Absolutely agree. We (AnyLeaf) send a weekly email newsletter to our users, with one-click unsubscribe. Companies that make unsubscribing difficult are ruining it for everyone. Even though we are very clear about the fact that we'll be sending email and make it simple to unsubscribe, we still get users flagging our messages as spam. This seems to be largely because unsubscribing from email newsletters has become so annoying that a significant fraction of users will just mark a message as spam rather than figure it out, even if the message is not truly spam.
It's hard to blame them, especially when huge senders like Target make it so difficult to unsubscribe that the author of this blog post couldn't figure it out:
A large number of (non-technical) users associate "Mark as spam" with "I don't want to receive this anymore." In some cases, bad experiences with unsubscribe links may have nothing to do with it.
You could properly solve that problem by letting them sign up for the email in the first place and rather than say "we will send you and you will have to unsubscribe".
I really wish Google or one of the big email providers would add an unsubscribe button. It would try to do the right thing in the unsubscribe flow, and apply a personal filter, but not penalize the sender.
It's hard to blame them, especially when huge senders like Target make it so difficult to unsubscribe that the author of this blog post couldn't figure it out:
http://bigfatmarketingblog.com/2011/01/17/adventures-in-emai...
It's a shame that RFC 2369, which provides a standard for unsubscribing from mailing lists, has never been widely adopted.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt