Hey, looks like I’m extremely late to the party. After I published this, a far more astute observer pointed out in EmailGeeks that the change was announced as a part of the larger update that Gmail rolled out in April – of 2018!

For some years now, Gmail has offered a prompted unsubscribe feature based on the presence and method of the List-unsubscribe header, and on sender reputation. The prompt would appear in the chrome of the client interface above an individual marketing message.

Reactions from senders were mixed when it was first rolled out. On the plus side, it arguably pre-empts some portion of spam complaints that might be more accurately characterized as malformed unsubscribe requests. On the minus side, senders generally prefer larger lists, even where significant chunks of them are inflated with unengaged recipients.

For the first time yesterday, I observed that Gmail has taken the functionality and made it much more robust. I’ve highlighted a pair of very interesting changes in the mobile screenshot below: Continue reading →