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A new Gmail feature that lets you unsubscribe from email lists with a single click is seemingly being ignored by many companies.
Google announced the new feature to "declutter your inbox" in July - and was part of my recent article on five brilliant Gmail features you should be using. The Manage Subscriptions feature lets you see a list of companies that regularly send you email and then click an "unsubscribe" button to supposedly remove your email address from their mailing list.
However, it seems many companies are simply not supporting the feature. Having removed multiple senders using Manage Subscriptions last month, many of the companies involved - including the airline Ryanair, the New Scientist and several other newsletters - have not stopped sending emails.
Instead, Google is merely diverting those emails directly to the Spam folder. While that means that the "unsubscribed" emails don't appear in your inbox, it's also not the same as an unsubscription and could have unintended consequences. For example, if you decided to opt-out of Ryanair marketing emails with the feature, but later booked a flight with the company, emails concerning the flight details could end up in your spam folder.
Google first announced that it would require "large senders" to support one-click unsubscription back in October 2023.
"You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to stop receiving unwanted messages from a particular email sender," the company's group product manager for Gmail security, Neil Kumaran wrote at the time. "It should take one click."
"So we're requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click, and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. We've built these requirements on open standards so that once senders implement them, everyone who uses email benefits."
Although Google originally stated that it would begin enforcing this in February 2024, it wasn't until this summer that the feature was offered to Gmail users, but it seems that still hasn't been long enough for some companies to adjust their systems.
When asked to comment on why emails from some unsubscribed email lists were still arriving, a spokesperson for Google said: "Not all senders honor these unsubscribe requests, so Gmail proactively filters out any new or future emails from the sender and directs them to the user's Spam folder."
Whether Google will inflict any further punishment on companies that don't support its one-click unsubscription protocol remains to be seen, but the mere act of moving those emails to the Spam folder could have consequences for the senders.
The frequency with which a sender's messages are marked as spam can affect their reputation score. Senders with a low reputation score are more likely to have their emails delivered to spam folders by default, which could severely damage the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and mean legitimate customers don't receive messages they're expecting, resulting in an increase in customer complaints and support requests.
Gmail's dominance as the world's largest email provider, with a claimed 2.5 billion users worldwide, means it's in a strong position to lay down the rules. Companies may ignore Gmail's unsubscribe feature at their peril.