Cool Technology of the Week

I recently wrote about the explosion of business spam.

One of my blog commenters introduced me to Unsubscribe.com which provides a free, timesaving, easy to use unsubscribe utility.

Numerous times a day, I click on an email scroll to the unsubscribe area, have to figure out the proprietary unsubscribe functionality of the business spammer, retype my email address, and hope it works since unsubscribe sites are generally slow and unreliable.

With Unsubscribe.com, I just download a plug in for my email client (apple mail), and simply click on the unsubscribe icon whenever unwanted email appears in my inbox.   The unsubscribe servers use natural language processing to figure out the unsubscribe methodology and send the unsubscribe request.

It has easily saved me 15 minutes a day.

Of course the ultimate answer would be for advertisers to act more ethically.   I had a great conversation with Dave Smith, Compliance Officer for Constant Contact about their efforts to enforce email advertising best practices.    A few items

1.  They ask their clients to certify pre-existing business relationships or opt-in before sending email.   Some clients do not follow this policy guidance the Constant Contact compliance team does their best to identify and stop abuses by their customers.

2.  They created "Safe Unsubscribe" to make it easier for recipients to remove themselves from mailing lists.   It really works - Safe Unsubscribe does actually stop the flow of advertising.

3.  They will honor a  global "do not call" designation for all email newsletters if such a request is made to the compliance department.

My wife uses Constant Contact for her NKG Art Gallery Newsletter, so I'm not opting out of all communications just yet.   Only a small portion of my business spam comes from advertisers using Constant Contact - a tribute to their ethical marketing compliance efforts.

A utility to automatically unsubscribe and a company using a compliance team to reduce unwanted email.    That's cool!