Email Unsubscribe Services Don’t Really Work. Follow This (Free) Advice Instead.

Unsolicited emails suck, and Congress agrees. In 2003, the legislature passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) in an attempt to address the people’s plight. That law, enforced by the FTC, sets email standards that every commercial provider must follow. Among them is a requirement that companies include an easy way to opt out of future communications and that they honor those opt-out requests in a timely manner. In theory, clicking the Unsubscribe link or button on unwanted emails should result in a less cluttered inbox. But reality often doesn’t align with theory.

Not even spam filters have won the battle against spammers. Many people with active email accounts can sense they’re getting more unwanted emails than ever before. The semi-defunct Spam Archive, run by Bruce Guenter, collected 5.1 million spam emails over 15 years (1998 to 2013), as noted during the 9th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. More recently, from 2019 to 2021, the number of unsolicited-email reports has quadrupled, according to the FTC’s 2021 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book. And that’s only among documented complaints, said Frances Kern, an attorney at the FTC’s Division of Marketing Practices. She admitted that self-reporting can be laborious for those who receive dozens of unwanted or spam emails a day, so the majority of complaints never make it into its system.

“Not much has changed [with the CAN-SPAM Act] in 20 years,” said Jennifer King, PhD, Privacy and Data Policy Fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “So much of this is happening at scale, so a single consumer trying to fight back is just the epitome of the little, little, tiny mouse trying to overthrow the giant.”

Rather than report the emails to the FTC, follow multistep unsubscribe prompts, or hunt for a tiny Unsubscribe link buried in the message, most people either ignore the emails, delete them, or mark them as spam, according to a small study from the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. On average, the study found, people subscribe to 93 email lists, but 85% to 90% of the messages are never read.

“Users want a clean inbox but are simply overwhelmed by the high frequency of marketing emails,” said Jayati Dev, PhD, a privacy engineer who co-authored the paper. And mechanisms for unsubscribing from unwanted messages are often complex and inaccessible, she said. Some people become so overwhelmed with the emails they receive that they abandon their accounts altogether and start anew.

The convoluted unsubscribe process that many mailing lists employ is a prime example of a phenomenon known as dark patterns, a term coined by UX specialist Harry Brignull, who later renamed the problem deceptive design to be clearer and more inclusive. These practices manipulate people and make it extremely difficult to delete subscriptions, services, and unwanted emails. Examples of deceptive design include adding surprise items into a virtual shopping cart, making promotional offers mandatory, “confirm shaming” people into keeping a service, or insisting on a multistep process to unsubscribe. “Every step turns into persuasion, and people can’t exercise consent when they’ve been tricked,” Brignull warned.

The tricks that lock you into an ouroboros of mailings don’t stop there. For example, email segmentation and drip-marketing campaigns can cause you to be signed up for a dozen types of emails from the same company, so unsubscribing from one doesn’t unsubscribe you from everything. Retailer websites, for example, can send deal alerts, account updates, shipping notifications, “we miss you” messages, and promotions. Without your knowledge, each message can come from a separate email subscription. The tools we tested can’t reliably differentiate between assorted mailing lists from the same company and remove you from all those lists. Don’t be surprised if an email unsubscribe service asks you to approve unsubscribe requests multiple times for the same company.

Bad email practices also create accessibility concerns. When an email sender wants you to do something, it often makes the text of its request large and easy to read. But finding the little Unsubscribe button or link can feel like an unwanted treasure hunt. Neurodivergent people may give up easily if they have to make several clicks to unsubscribe from a service, our experts say. Or, people with limited vision may struggle to find the button or link in the first place. The link is often buried in the footer or the body of a long email and presented in a tiny, grayed-out font. This goes against design standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which say that most text and images should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. (Note that some companies skirt this standard by describing the footer section of an email created by a script as a user interface component, which doesn’t have to abide by the same accessibility standards.)

The complexities of bad design, marketing practices, and user behavior make it hard for unsubscribe services to do their job in a way that people expect them to—so hard that it’s not worthwhile for people to use them, according to several experts we interviewed. “The value proposition is very limited concerning what you have to give them in return,” Brignull said, referring to people’s email data. “It does make me wonder what they’re really doing with the data and whether it’s really worth the risk.”

Yet, as the unsubscribe providers noted in interviews with us, they’re attempting to solve an issue caused by commercial and spam-email senders that don’t comply with CAN-SPAM regulations. Even when you’re paying for a service, you’re still at the mercy of your junk email.

Ultimately, you can use some techniques to block emails that come flooding in due to these unscrupulous tactics. Although it takes a bit of effort, you can manage your inbox on your own terms—without giving your data away to yet another company.