GMail’s ultimate gift to mankind

I would bet that just about anyone reading this post still has one or two newsletter, or newslist, types of emails that they are no longer interested in coming into their email inboxes. These are the one’s that we signed up for as part of some service we thought was cool at the time or some site’s mailing list that we thought we would always be interested in. Things change, interests move on but still we get those emails coming but now they are caught by filters or rules and shuffled off to the trash bin.

Much of the time this happens because we forget the information we provided when we signed up. Even myself I still have four or five emails coming in regularly but they head to the junk folder because I’ll be damned if I can remember some obscure password I might have used at the time.

Well I just found out via Zee over at TheNextWeb.com that Google’s GMail has come to the rescue with a new feature that attempts to help you with this problem. As of today you can now use the Unsubscribe tool to have GMail send an unsubscribe request on your behalf at the same time as you mark the email as spam.

From the GMail support page on this new option

You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!”

This almost makes me want to use Gmail for a week or so.