By Patrick May / San Jose Mercury News
A FEW months back, apparently in a moment of spiritual weakness, I subscribed to a newsletter from DailyOM, a web site devoted to “Nurturing Mind Body & Spirit.” I soon learned that they’d be nurturing me through an incessant stream of e-mails with subject lines like “Creating a Garden Sanctuary” and “Drumming.”
Realizing that I wasn’t ready to “Practice Surrender” via my Gmail inbox, I scrolled to the bottom of an e-mail in search of the 11 most beautiful letters in today’s English language. Unsubscribe.
For the next 10 minutes, I tried to shake the shackles of DailyOM. Pre-exit choices abounded: No, I don’t want to “share The Om” nor make DailyOM my homepage nor publish DailyOM on my web site. OK, OK, I’ll go back and sign on to change my password so I can then unsubscribe, if you insist.
Ten minutes, which in modern-day e-mail-unsubscribing time is more like 37 hours. My DailyOM had become my DailyOMG! STOP!!! Like a bad pop song or an obnoxious pet video, junk e-mail continues to prove a cultural thorn in our collective side. Managing the deluge is hard enough, but companies messing with our heads while we’re trying to unhitch our wagon and stop the inflow seems particularly cruel. I decided to explore the inner workings of what I call “The Unsubscribe”.
A FUNNY GOOD-BYE
FOR the next hour, I tried to break free of dozens of other e-mail subscriptions that over the years had somehow gotten stuck to my online shoe like a wad of digital gum. Most offenders offered a straightforward fix: a simple click or two let me know I was unsubscribed, even though in the back of my mind I worried that this was a dodgy ploy by the sender to verify my e-mail so they could sell it to 100 more marketeers.
Next up was a message with the memo line “My Legs Now Look Amazing.”
But before I could even open it, I got a warning in red saying “DON’T OPEN!” So now I couldn’t even get into the e-mail to unsubscribe to the e-mail that I’d foolishly subscribed to in the first place. Then one from “Preston Kenny,” who invited me to “make things spicy and fun with a pill.”
Again, the e-mail provided no to way to disconnect. On and on it went: the online ticket discounter Goldstar (clear exit choices, piece of cake), The Information tech blog (pain, like many others that make you sign into the site to get away from the site forever).
Then, finally, I hit pay dirt: a company providing me a quick way to unsubscribe that’s actually easy and fun to do. Click “unsubscribe” on HubSpot, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based sales marketing company, and you get a video clip of a pitiful loser making a heartfelt—and hilarious—plea to persuade you to keep subscribing. “OK, I get it,” he says. “You don’t want to hear from me anymore.” And then 54 seconds of comedic bliss as he stumbles along, trying to keep his girlfriend (you, the subscriber) from dumping his sorry, um, subscription:
“Maybe I can change?” he says.
“We try,” HubSpot Spokesman Laura Moran told me, “to have a good sense of humor and always put the customer at the center of everything we do. We want to make things as easy and seamless for them as we can, and if that means unsubscribing from our e-mails, we want to make that easy, too.”
PROFESSIONAL OPINIONS
I then reached out with my own e-mail blast to experts of The Unsubscribe. Here were people who knew the subject inside and out, either as marketing consultants or as bloggers and educators and assorted victims who’ve figured out ways to deal with the entire mess that greets us each morning in our inbox.
It was quite eye-opening.
I was told by self-described “computer psychologist” and Psychsoftpc CEO Tim Lynch that “you should never unsubscribe to a junk e-mailer.”
“It is just a trick to confirm that the e-mail address is live,” he explained. “They will then sell that address to other junkers and you will get far more spam than you started out with. The best strategy is to just ignore it.”
Several other experts told me the same thing. Huffington Post blogger and computer guru Sajeel Qureshi said “sometimes the unsubscribe link is really just a link to validate an e-mail address. They don’t ever really unsubscribe you.”
And Harold Mann, with Mann Consulting in San Francisco, wrote to say, “Any company that requires you to ‘log in’ to get to your account to unsubscribe, etc., don’t bother. If they aren’t employing a ‘safe-unsubscribe’ or a ‘one-click unsubscribe,’ then they may be unethical in how they process your desire to be left alone.”
I also learned about Unroll.me, a free and easy-to-use tool that helps clean up your inbox of unwanted e-mails while delivering a personalized daily digest of those subscriptions you do want to hold on to. Kinda cool, though once I skimmed its privacy policy, I wondered if Unroll.me, just like everyone else in Subscriptionland, might also be selling my e-mail address to the highest bidder. (An Unroll.me representative told me that they do not, but I still felt queasy after reading their policy’s legal mumbo-jumbo.) There was more. I got a lot of “Top 10 Tips” lists, including one from consultant Jennifer Martin that suggested things like creating a separate e-mail account just for shopping and online registrations; never give out your primary e-mail for any contests or drawings.
As Martin put it, “What drives me crazy is you go to a networking group and then three weeks later you get an e-mail pitch about Juice Plus just because you exchanged e-mail addresses with someone.”
Enough, I thought. After all this stress of trying to clean up my e-mails and worrying whether I was just digging myself a deeper hole by unsubscribing in the first place, what I needed was some calming and meditative advice.
Maybe I should sign up again for DailyOM.