We have the Archive and Report Spam buttons inside GMail. Wouldn’t it be great if Google had an Unsubscribe button too for those emails that come in via Newsletters? Much better than having to go into each email and finding and reading their method of unsubscribing from their mailing lists. Perhaps if Google and Yahoo! and Hotmail came up with a common standard like nofollow it would get a wider adoption?
In return GMail might more strongly ensure these newsletters don’t get marked as spam.
there’s even a defined standard to do it, too, which many senders use: RFC 2369. more info: http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/
Unfortunately, many mailing list systems use strange and ancient software, and people would only get frustrated with it when it didn’t work. As it is, none of the blame goes to Google.
That said, it should be possible to recognise things like MailMan and show a button for them…
None the less, it would be a compelling reason to move all your mail management to Gmail (along with their spam filtering: hatip to earlier posting!). I use the filtering tip to stop email spam to my blackberry, and it is spectacularly helpful. If I could manage my inbound email newsletters, subs, etc. I think Google would be well placed to be my personal content manager. mmmm….
MailMan (and Sympa, and ezmlm, and Google Groups, and Y! Groups) use RFC 2369 iirc.