How does in-built “unsubscribe” functionality in Gmail work?

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When you receive bunch of promotional emails from a website, sometimes there is a link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe from similar future emails but sometimes there is no such link. However, Gmail provides with a button to unsubscribe from these emails regardless without visiting any other website. How does it work?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

By law, most of those e-mails are required to have an “Unsubscribe” button in them that make it easy for the user to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Many of these links operate identically to each other, you either:

1. Click the link and are immediately unsubscribed
2. Click the link and enter the e-mail you want to be unsubscribed
3. Click the link and fill out a small form to unsubscribe.

Google analyses these e-mails and learns how different unsubscribe links work. When they are confident that their bots can unsubscribe for a particular company’s e-mail list, they will provide the option to its G-Mail user to let Google’s bot handle the unsubscription rather than the user doing it themselves.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The email headers (which aren’t normally visible to the user) will normally contain unsubscribe links if the email is from a reputable sender. When gmail identifies that an unsubscribe link is there it will give you the option of unsubscribing in addition to reporting the spam.

You can view these headers by selecting a message and then selecting “show original”.