Between the mid-term political electioneering and the upcoming gift giving season, I have been inundate with literally hundreds of emails a day and although the elections are over the electioneering goes on relatively unabated. So I have embarked on a journey of unsubscribing to all but the most interesting mailing lists. Unsubscribing from most political lists works well (but they all too often give their lists to other related campaigns). But I am frequently encountering commercial sites where the Submit button does not work. At first I suspected it was some incompatibility with Safari, but it doesn't work when using Firefox or Chrome, and the results are the same on MacOS and iOS.

I can always call their customer service department on the phone and complain or train Mail and/or SpamSeive the offending emailer is spam (which of course continues the useless consumption of bandwidth), but these are legitimate and highly reputable vendors and they should work. (I haven't looked at the site code but it would appear from the GUI these sites all are using the same email service or mailing list management software.)

My question is whether anyone else is running into the dis-functional submit button problem or is it just me?

It seems to me that I've run into at least one dysfunctional "Unsubscribe" button (but I'm experiencing a bigger problem with snail mail, i.e. calling customer service to opt out gets me a "Sure", but the mail doesn't stop).

Why not just make rules in Mail to immediately delete the offending emails?

I have been around since the days when dial-up or, if you were a big enough company, you could set up your own network using microwave towers at a half million or so a pop. Today I have more bandwidth coming into my house than some fortune 100 companies had in those days. But believe it or not, bandwidth is finite, and with the growth of streaming video and other content, we are rapidly approaching the bandwidth limits of our current technology.

I for one like paying a single monthly fee for the bandwidth coming into my home, but when that is exhausted I fully expect to see bandwidth limits placed on the internet coming Into my. house similar to those on cellphones today. (If you haven't maxed out your cellphone bandwidth lately, it is a real shock when your so called unlimited plan cuts you back to pre-4G speeds or you get a bill with $15, $30, $60 or more tacked on, for the additional 4G bandwidth you used the previous month. (My son lived in the mountains of Southern Colorado for a while and the only internet available is satellite which bills like cell phones and subscribed to two different satellite providers because their overage plans involved disconnecting the subscriber until the end of the billing period when he ran out of data download bytes.)

Point being, if I trash email after it reaches my computer or iPhone or iPad or Watch the bandwidth has already been used and could easily have been used productively had it not been used sending useless spam. If it was received by one of my iOS devices through a cellular connection it has counted against my data download for the month. And if the iPhone and iPad are on different accounts that data could be charged to both accounts which is why I do not have cellular on my iPad and instead link it to a Personal Hotspot on my iPhone when WiFi is not available (but it costs extra on my iPhone account to have that ability).

BANDWIDTH IS A FINITE RESOURCE TO BE PRESERVED NOT WASTED

{apparently you touched a hot button I didn't know was there 😜}

And I"m glad I did!

Your post gets into virgin, food for thought territory, particularly to me as a non-iDevice user.

I think it would be a good idea to give it its own thread for the benefit of those who may not see it in its present context.

Good idea. Although I'm a user who has never even come close to my limits, it would be good to have a better understanding in order to pass the word along.

Tangentially related, one nice feature of Proton Mail is that it has an unsubscribe button on the toolbar. You don't have to go to web sites and jump through hoops.

I have never seen/used Proton Mail, but I suspect unsubscribe at the email client level is equivalent to training SpamSieve that the message is SPAM. In other words although you don't see the message, it still gets sent and still takes up internet bandwidth.

Neither does the sender get any information or feedback — that could be good or bad depending on your point of view.