Whether it’s plain old spam, promotional emails from a company you did some business with or marketing missives that you don’t recall asking for, your email Inbox can still descend into chaos in a matter of days if you don’t take the necessary steps to keep on top of the situation.
Removing yourself from a mailing list usually requires time, dedication, patience and a magnifying glass, as the ‘unsubscribe’ button is more often than not buried at the bottom of the message in letters smaller than an ant’s footprint.
If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll be pleased to learn that the service is making it easier to unsubscribe from unwanted marketing guff. So now, when such a mail lands in your Inbox, an ‘unsubscribe’ link will appear clear as day in the header information of the message. Click it and you’re done. No more hunting around for that tiny-text link. No more squinting. No more magnifying glass.
According to Google’s Vijay Eranti, the new system should not only please Gmail users, but also help Google to sort spam from genuine promotional mails to which a user at some point subscribed – or failed to opt out of receiving.
“One of the biggest problems with the Gmail spam filter is identifying unwanted mail or soft spam,” Eranti said, explaining that some users hit the ‘spam’ button when they can’t find the unsubscribe link, even when it’s from a company that was earlier given permission by the user to send such material. If enough users report a message as spam, Gmail could identify the sender as a spammer, a situation which might cause delivery issues for a genuine company further down the line.
Eranti said the new feature is essentially designed to help “empower users with an easy way to control what they want to receive.”
If it means fewer unwanted messages, a more orderly Inbox and no more hunting around for a microscopic link, then it’s a development that’s bound to be welcomed by all users of Google’s Web-based email service.
[IT World via Cnet] [Image: Lansvision / Shutterstock]
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