Unsubscribing From Web Sites

 

As you may or may not know, my wife, Celia, died in December. She was always signing up for various newsletters from reputable companies and over the last few weeks, I've been trying to unsubscribe from them.

With most companies there are two simple methods :-

1. You click a link in the e-mail and this takes you to an unsubscribe page where you type in the e-mail address and then click unsubscribe. This works well.

2. The second and better method is where the e-mail address is built into the link that is clicked. This works even better.

One of the problems, is that I can't send e-mails from her e-mail address and I've just diverted her e-mails to mine. So some companies, like Tesco, want an e-mail sent from the e-mail address to be unsubscribed.

I can't do that. (Well I could, but I'm playing the bereaved person here, who knows little of the Internet.) So in Tesco's case, to cancel her messages, it took me a couple of e-mails.

So their system, which is probably designed to make it difficult to unsubscribe, actually costs them money, as it is not a fully automated system, that can be used by the person who received the e-mails.

Other companies require a login to unsubscribe. As Celia never wrote her passwords down, I can't do that. So those companies that continue to send me unwanted e-mails are now on my never-buy-from list.

So when you design an unsubscribe system, do it properly.