You can already quickly unsubscribe from undesired newsletters in gmail by clicking on the small arrow near the sender/receiver contact details and clicking on the "Unsubscribe from this sender" link. It seems like most (all?) of the times it sends back an empty email with "UNSUBSCRIBE" as its subject, which most newsletter mailing system correctly interpret as an unsubscription request. The approach described in the article is somewhat orthogonal to this, in that it scans the email for the unsubscribe link, so it's still not useless, I guess they complement each other.

The system you describe is using the List-Unsubscribe header, which is actually formalized in RFC 2369 and (if it exists in the email) seems like a way better solution than search for a piece of text.

A lot of ISP's already support a UI for unsubscribing, for example Gmail http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-eas....

For more info on how this works check out http://www.list-unsubscribe.com

You should remove the hl=es parameter in the URL to the Chrome store or everybody will see the store in Spanish.

Poorly written, does not even work for me.

Just hit SPAM and google will give you the option to unsubscribe.

Doesn't the google spam thing affect the global standing of the sender? If that's the case it's probably the good internet citizen thing to unsubscribe without marking as spam if it isn't spam, otherwise it's negatively affecting the deliverability of someone legitimate.

This is a feature. If an email newsletter doesn't have a functioning opt out (one that works with email address forwarding , I must add), the sender is not a good internet citizen.

Please don't do this unless there isn't a link within the newsletter. I seem to get a couple of people that do this every month with my Hacker Newsletter. I don't think a couple hurts, but it can if it goes above some percentage of your subscriber size.

you should not mark newsletters as spam as a quick way of unsubscribing from them, since it will affect the score of the sender; other people may find their content relevant, since they subscribed to them.

For everyone replying/panicing about this approach:

Google gives you two options when you hit spam,

   1) just unsubscribe 
   2) unsubscribe and report spam.

I'm surprised those with newsletters haven't tested this.

Oh and if you auto-subscribed me for anything other than me specifically adding my email to a "subscribe" form - you deserve to be spammed. Signing up for a site isn't a newsletter opt-in by itself.