Unsubscribing has become a tad easier on Gmail
Newsletters, periodical social networking updates, information about new posts, and other automated messages that you receive regularly are either welcome information or something that you tend to ignore.
I do not use email for these kind of things, as I prefer RSS for most of what I want to keep an eye on. Email newsletters do have their purpose, but the good ones are rare and the ones that are either meaningless or useless seem to be plenty.
Most automated messages that land in your email account have unsubscribe links attached to them. At the very least, the legitimate ones have. There are spam messages as well with unsubscribe links, but they do not really unsubscribe you from anything, but record that the email account is active which makes it worth more money.
There are two main ways to unsubscribe from legitimate automated messages. Either through a link displayed in the message which takes you to a website where you can unsubscribe -- and maybe need to sign in first to do so -- or by replying to the email in question and using a stop word or phrase.
If you are using Google's popular web mail service Gmail, you may have noticed that the company has started to add unsubscribe links to the very top of the message, right next to the name and email address in the header.
When you click on the unsubscribe link, a prompt is displayed that verifies that you want to cancel receiving these messages.
Unsubscribe from [name]
Are you sure you want to stop receiving messages from [name]?
If you select the unsubscribe option here, Google will inform the sender of the message that you want to be removed from the mailing list.
All emails that you have already received from the sender will remain visible on Gmail.
It is not clear how Gmail does it. The most likely explanation is that it scans emails for unsubscribe links and just moves those links to the visible location in the email's header. Then again, this would usually require some activity on a web page, and I cannot really see Gmail doing so.
Google notes that know spam messages won't display the unsubscribe link even if they do offer one, and that it may take up to three days before the unsubscription request has been processed.
There may also be situations where a link is not displayed in the header. In this case, it is still necessary to find it manually in the email message, or to cancel a subscription by contacting the owner.
Closing Words
So how useful is that feature, and for whom? I can see this feature work quite well for inexperienced users who just want to get rid of a newsletter or other automated messages that they receive regularly.
Experienced users on the other hand may prefer to use the unsubscribe link directly if provided. While that means more clicking and opening the site in a web browser of choice, it removes the uncertainty about how well Google's implementation actually works.
Plus, you usually do not have to wait three days before you do not receive messages anymore.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!