Recent subscriber? Here's some background about this newsletter. Was this email forwarded to you? Then you need your own subscription. Please tell the person who forwarded it that I said thank you! 

Happy New Year's Eve. Have fun, stay safe and hope to see you in 2023.

I’ve been doing end-of-year clean-up, unsubscribing from email lists that I no longer read.

Earlier this year, I subscribed to an email list based on a project I was working on.

That project concluded, so the email list was no longer relevant.

I went to unsubscribe and got really annoyed.

The email uses a white background and the footer rendered its text in the color of light-gray.

In other words, all of the footer copy, including the unsubscribe link, was unreadable.

Here’s what the HTML looked like:



This could have been an innocent design error.

Or, it could be that the email sender tried to “camouflage” the unsubscribe link.

I figured it was the latter. I was more annoyed over this than if the sender added me to their email list without my permission.

Email is a two-sided relationship.

When I subscribed, I was placing my trust in the email sender:

“I’m interested in what you have to say and I place my trust in you.”

In return, the email sender should place trust back on the subscriber.

That means giving them an easy way to unsubscribe if the email is no longer relevant or if the subscriber is no longer interested.

In this instance, the trust I placed in the email sender was one-sided. It should be two-sided.

Trustingly,
-Dennis.