I am someone who subscribes to a lot of newsletters but rarely ever reads any of them. When starting this project, I had over 10,000 unread emails, the majority of which I can guarantee were either spam or unwanted news letters.
I decided to take a 3 day input of my emails. So in three days I had received 279 emails. 22 of those I had read while the rest I either wanted to unsubscribe from the newsletter or wasn’t interested in the article sent to me. So, I clicked the spam and unsubscribe bubble on google for 207 emails. My project thus was to determine how many of these e-mails would actually get unsubscribed and which one’s would continue sending me newsletters.
Overall, I thought the project went better as expected. And by better, I mean far more of my e-mails have stayed in the spam folder than not. There are some persistent e-mails though. For example above the second to last reported e-mail was from Groupon which I have in the past unsubscribed to multiple times and still receive emails from them. Of course, this time was no different as I still got an e-mail from Groupon after unsubscribing.
I read up on Groupon’s e-mail practices and I am not the only one with such an issue.
In fact, Groupon’s e-mail marketing is such a problem that the Australian Communications and Media Authority issued a warning to the company about its’ unsubscribe process. Apparently when signing up one signs up for multiple different types of Groupon newsletters thus to unsubscribe one has to unsubscribe to each and every kind of newsletter instead of just one of them. Unfortunately, this seems like an ordeal that I’ll have to contact customer support over. I am happy I learned about interesting laws such as the Spam Act in Australia which regulates commercial marketing and necessitates the need for a functional unsubscribe button, informed consent, and proper identification.
Despite hangups with groupons unsubscribe process most unsubscribing and sending to the spam box worked out well, with even a couple of lists I was subscribed to sending me a confirmation e-mail that I was removed from the list. It is possible though that I will have other groupon like e-mail problems though as many newsletters I receive only come once a week or are somewhat infrequent. Thus it is possible by Friday I could still be receiving e-mails from sources I shouldn’t be.