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I just got a type of junk email ("Top new X Stack Exchange Users") that I had never seen before. I can unsubscribe from that specific site's emails of that type, but I cannot find network-wide email preferences which would enable me to specify that I don't want to get junk email from any Stack Exchange site.

Ideally there would be one tickybox that specified: no email of any kind, ever, from any site, with the sole exception of the network-wide inbox summary. Checking that box should both stop all mail that might be sent now, and prevent me from ever getting signed up for any new type of mail that might be sent in the future, even if it hasn't been thought of yet. And it should apply to the entire network, including all new sites that might be added in the future, and independent of whether I already have an account on any given site.

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  • Just to clarify, this is the email sent to inform you that you're on a top user list? I know that's independent to the feature being asked, I just want to be certain of the email type you received.
    – user50049
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 7:35
  • @TimPost Yes, that was the one. I imagine that's existed for a while and I just never happened to hit it before now. But as you say, that's independent of the feature request. (Really, I'd be content with some kind of network-wide email preferences screen + a way to preemptively opt out of future additional categories of email.)
    – zwol
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 13:23
  • Closely related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/298909/168273
    – Martin Schröder
    Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 21:47

1 Answer 1

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I'm reviving and expanding on this, because I think that this is something that needs some attention.

Whenever you receive an email through one of the available buckets listed on the Edit Email Settings page, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. However, clicking on it will only unsubscribe you from that one email bucket through which the email was sent. If a user wants to unsubscribe from everything, for whatever reason, they have to login and visit that settings page and click Off for every single one.

I can understand this not being much of an issue in the past when we only had three email buckets and the unread inbox option. But then we added all the Jobs emails to that page. And then we created a research bucket. And then we added Teams will all their own buckets. And then we added The Overflow newsletter. And now in present day we have a really long page of email options including:

  • Unread inboxes for public and all Teams
  • Five different primary email buckets
  • Links to community digests and question subscriptions
  • All the jobs emails
  • The job search status (under Job Preferences) that actually does control receiving recommend Jobs emails despite not being mentioned on the email settings page

That's a lot of stuff, and I don't think it makes sense anymore to not have an easy one-click button that would just turn all of it off swiftly for those who simply do not desire any of the emails anymore. Requiring all the manual click action and browsing around in different settings is annoying to the end-user, and more time consuming than should be necessary.

The Proposal:

  • Add a button to the email settings page to quickly wipe all of these preferences to the Off position.
  • Add the same button to the landing page for the unsubscribe link, to both emphasize that their unsubscribe only affected one thing and make it easy for users to turn off everything else with minimal effort.

(Please note this is not a formal proposal actively being pursued by us. This is simply me voicing my opinions as a user on the need of such a feature.)

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