Gmail Provides Unsubscribe Option for Mailing Lists

By George Bilbrey
President

As reported in Lifehacker, Gmail is now providing an unsubscribe option for mailing lists to users. They are doing this using the mailto: type of the List-Unsubscribe header. This means that you can get a complaint message in ARF format when someone unsubscribes from you at Gmail.

How do you take advantage? According to the Gmail postmaster:

1) You authenticate your mail with SPF and DKIM
2) You have a good sender reputation
3) You have a mailto: list-unsubscribe header.

If you do this and a Gmail user chooses the "unsubscribe and report spam" button shown in the Lifehacker post, you should magically get a complaint message to that mailto: link, which you should immediately remove from your mailing list.

Gmail doesn't have a feedback loop that is open to most mailers, but here is a way to get some idea of what Gmail users are complaining about.