We’ve all been there: once upon a time, some company or organization asked for an email address, and now, several months later, their email messages are still pouring in, even though you didn’t quite want them in the first place.
Google has decided to take matters into its own hands with a new feature in Gmail that finds an unsubscribe link in any message that a user receives in their Social, Promotions or Forums inbox and copies it in a convenient location at the top of any message, right next to the sender’s address.
It’s a move that’s designed to give users the ability to easily ditch bulk mailings that they’re not reading without having to wade through the entire message text to unsubscribe.
The Mountain View-based company is marketing the change as a win for newsletter owners as well as consumers. In the past, people have marked newsletters as spam in order to get them out of their inbox (I’m certainly guilty of this) which then prevents the sender from getting their message through to people who might actually want to read it. In Google’s view, this change will make it easy for people to unsubscribe and avoid reaching for the “Mark as Spam” button.
The change comes more than a year after Google released a new tabs feature in Gmail that automatically categorizes emails into different sections. The move was designed to make it easier for people to see messages that they need to act on right away, and hide those that people don’t have to view right away.
