How can I unsubscribe from American Public Media's e-mail newsletters?

September 30, 2006 3:25 PM

I'm currently subscribed to, and wish to unsubscribe from, American Public Media's "Speaking of Faith" and "Writer's Almanac" e-mail newsletters. Neither APM's site nor the newsletters themselves seem to offer an unsubscribe function. I even e-mailed APM several months ago to request that I be removed from their mailing list, but haven't heard back. Short of adding APM to my ISP's or mail client's spam filter, how can I stop these newsletters?
posted by cmyers to computers & internet (11 comments total)

An unsubscribe address is typically included in recurrent mailings from a list, or often in every message from it. You send a message to that list, formatted as instructed in the unsub instructions (usually "Unsubscribe" in the Subject or Body fields) and the list management software drops you, and will usually send a final confirm message to the address of record.

It's often not a Web based unsub routing at all, a left over mechanism of traditional list self-management by email schemes from the dawn of the Internet.
posted by paulsc at 3:34 PM on September 30, 2006

If there's nothing in the emails or the web site, and they won't respond to your emails, you might as well just bite the bullet and create a filter that deletes those messages upon receipt. There are a lot of email lists out there that you just can't ever leave.
posted by BackwardsCity at 4:01 PM on September 30, 2006

paulsc: I'd assumed and hoped that that would be the case, but the messages make no reference of such an unsubscribe mechanism. I even sent messages to unsubscribe at each of the domains, but they bounced.

APM seems to be using EmailLabs for their mailing lists, but their site is unhelpful too.

I suppose I'd better go the filter route, and send another message to APM in the meantime...
posted by cmyers at 4:15 PM on September 30, 2006

Try simply replying to one of the mailings, using Unsubscribe as the subject and Unsubscribe as the entire message body. If that doesn't work, filter.
posted by flabdablet at 5:18 PM on September 30, 2006

I would hesitate to be the threatening type, but there's an email address for their lawyer on the APM Terms of Use page. A gently worded note about the legal ramifications of sending bulk email without an unsubscribe mechanism might help.
posted by bcwinters at 5:50 PM on September 30, 2006

I've heard that not offering unsubscribe links could be considered illegal, but couldn't find any source to back that up.

The closest I found was this act, but it deals more with commercial spam and not just free mailing lists that don't offer easy unsubscribe.
posted by rsanheim at 7:44 PM on September 30, 2006

Blanket their company with requests to unsubscribe. They're not providing you an easy way, so they are, in a sense, spamming. If you semi-spam them back, and keep doing it every time you get an email from them, I imagine they'll stop pretty fast.

Just peruse their website for contact information, and try 'sales' and 'postmaster' and 'webmaster' as well. Be polite, just vociferous. Every time you get a mail from the list, blanket your list with nicely worded requests to stop mailing you anymore.

Usually this will work within a day or two.
posted by Malor at 8:02 PM on September 30, 2006

I get the Writer's Almanac and see an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every issue - down below "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®".

Clicking on it should take you to a page of options for a number of their email services.
posted by Cranberry at 12:54 AM on October 1, 2006

This link is an un-personalized version of the one at the bottom of my SOF newsletter.
posted by ibmcginty at 8:39 AM on October 1, 2006

This one is their "Report an e-mail related problem" link from the same newsletter.
posted by ibmcginty at 8:46 AM on October 1, 2006

Cranberry: When I view the newsletters in Mail, there's no visible unsubscribe link, but looking through my plain-text mail archives (stored in Subversion) indicates that there is one. Odd.

I tried the link, and although the form refuses to display correctly in either Safari or Firefox, I didn't get "The Writer's Almanac" this morning.

ibmcginty: Your first link takes me to a form where it seems I can only subscribe, not unsubscribe. I'll try your second link if the "Speaking of Faith" newsletter continues.

Thanks to you all.
posted by cmyers at 6:53 AM on October 2, 2006