Rogue unsubscribes - a follow up

A few days ago, MailChimp alerted us to the possibility that certain anti-spam technologies might be following links in emails, including unsubscribe links that take the recipient off your address list.

Which raises the ugly prospect of innocent and unwanted unsubscribes happening.

Fortunately, the problem seems minor at the moment. Not least because many unsubscribe links require a second action to take effect. Simply following the link does not take you off the list right away, but sends you to a preference page where you confirm your wish.

BUT...

A comment on my report asked about the possible impacts given the growing prevalence of the list-unsubscribe header.

This is an email header which includes a one-click unsubscribe link. See this website for an explanation of what it is and why more and more senders are using this header.

Anyway, if senders start putting the list-unsubscribe header in their outgoing emails, then all their emails to every receiving domain contain a one-click unsubscribe link in the header information.

So if rogue anti-spam technology clicks on the link in the header, the recipient is unsubscribed. An unsubscribe link in your actual message that uses a two-step process won't protect you.

That's all theory, so I asked the MailChimp folk for their thoughts.

Chad Morris was able to put us at ease...

"I haven't heard anything about spam filters clicking on the List-Unsubscribe link, and I would be very surprised if any did."

"When the unsubscribe link is in the body of the email message, it's possible that the spam filter just doesn't realize that the link is an unsubscribe link."

"However, the List-Unsubscribe header doesn't appear in the message body, and it is explicitly marked as an unsubscribe link according to a published standard."

"The only way a spam filter would click on it is if they clicked on anything that looked like a URL in the entire raw message, without decoding it first. Basically, only if they wrote an email spam filter without understanding how email works."

Thanks Chad!

Tags: email marketing, list-unsubscribe header, anti-spam

Permalink | November 20, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter

0 Comments:

Comments closed for this post