Gmail releases its feedback loop and a new unsubscribe button

published on 25/02/2014,

updated on 29/04/2022

Last week was the 30th conference of the MAAWG (an association that federates the fight against spam, among other things) in San Francisco. This conference was the occasion of a important announcement from Google. The giant of Mountain View has indeed announced the availability of its feedback loopFor once, it's Gmail that joins the other major American webmails. These have been offering a Feedback Loop for several years now. But as is often the case, Gmail doesn't do things the way its competitors do.

The Gmail Feedback Loop in practice

Open only to MAAWG member routers for now, this new feedback loop does not identify the complainant. A bit like what SignalSpam has set up with SFR and Orange in France, the objective here is to offer an additional tool to routers in order to detect senders generating numerous complaints. In practice, the router will be able to receive a CSV file containing three columns: the date, an identifier (which will be provided by the router in the header of the email to identify the sender) and a complaint rate (source: Wordtothewise).

The other new feature: the unsubscribe button

There was already an unsubscribe button based on the List-Unsubscribe function present in the header of certain emails. This time around, Gmail has gone one step further, and is clearly bringing this part to the fore, to the detriment of the unsubscribe link present in the email. The button will now be located next to the sender's name. For the web user, this is great news, as it saves time. And for the advertiser, it's good news too. Simplifying the unsubscribe process will result in fewer spam complaints, which has an extremely positive effect.

Remember that Gmail's List-Unsubscribe is based on an email address to which a message will be automatically sent when a user clicks on the unsubscribe button. Moreover, if Gmail's feedback loop does not identify the complainant, let's recall that by configuring the List-Unsubscribe, the author of the complaint will see this screen displayed: complaint-spam-gmail-list-unsubscribe

By clicking the "Unsubscribe and report spam" button, the subscriber not only generates a spam complaint, but also sends an unsubscribe request to the advertiser via List-Unsubscribe.

Sources:

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The author

Jonathan Loriaux

I've been involved in email marketing for over ten years, and my career path began on the technical side (email campaign integration) before moving on to sales (as an eCRM expert) and finally marketing consultancy. For the past 9 years, I've been the author of the Badsender.com blog. Emailing isn't just an expertise, it's truly become my passion, which is why Badsender is now my main activity, with the creation of an emailing consulting business linked to the site.

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