How can I unsubscribe from American Public Medias e-mail newsletters?
An unsubscribe address is typically included in recurrent mailings from a list, or often in every message from it. You send a message to that list, formatted as instructed in the unsub instructions (usually “Unsubscribe” in the Subject or Body fields) and the list management software drops you, and will usually send a final confirm message to the address of record. It’s often not a Web based unsub routing at all, a left over mechanism of traditional list self-management by email schemes from the dawn of the Internet.
Blanket their company with requests to unsubscribe. They’re not providing you an easy way, so they are, in a sense, spamming. If you semi-spam them back, and keep doing it every time you get an email from them, I imagine they’ll stop pretty fast. Just peruse their website for contact information, and try ‘sales’ and ‘postmaster’ and ‘webmaster’ as well. Be polite, just vociferous. Every time you get a mail from the list, blanket your list with nicely worded requests to stop mailing you anymore. Usually this will work within a day or two.
Cranberry: When I view the newsletters in Mail, there’s no visible unsubscribe link, but looking through my plain-text mail archives (stored in Subversion) indicates that there is one. Odd. I tried the link, and although the form refuses to display correctly in either Safari or Firefox, I didn’t get “The Writer’s Almanac” this morning. ibmcginty: Your first link takes me to a form where it seems I can only subscribe, not unsubscribe. I’ll try your second link if the “Speaking of Faith” newsletter continues. Thanks to you all.
I’ve heard that not offering unsubscribe links could be considered illegal, but couldn’t find any source to back that up. The closest I found was this act, but it deals more with commercial spam and not just free mailing lists that don’t offer easy unsubscribe.
