Tech

Google Has A Brilliant But Simple Cure For Unwanted Inbox Clutter

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Google is rolling out a simple new solution for people who feel like they're drowning in cluttered inboxes packed with promotional emails they don't care about. 

From now on, an obvious and clearly marked “unsubscribe” link will appear at the top of the header field in marketers’ emails, instead of in tiny print at the bottom, where they're usually hidden, PCWorld reports. You'll be able to unsubscribe without hunting through the whole email and without having to leave Gmail to redirect to a company's page. 

Marketers may moan about this new change because it will make it so much easier for people to block their messages, but Google says that it's actually adding this new link to help businesses.

When "unsubscribe" links are hidden at the bottom of emails in super-tiny text, some frustrated users decide to mark the messages as spam, even if they had originally signed up for the promotions on purpose. When Google sees enough people reporting a sender's messages, that sender gets classified as a spammer, which can cause delivery problems for all the company's emails down the line. 

Ultimately, Google says that it's introducing this new feature to empower users to control what they want to receive. 

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Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco.  She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021.  Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.