Back in 1995 or so, I joined a community of websites you may have heard of called Geocities. When they were acquired by Yahoo in 1999 and subsequently integrated with the Yahoo ID system, my login changed from “rizzn” to “rizzn.geo.”

My unique ID was apparently a coveted prize, as Yahoo (like most other services) did not allow users to sign up and request IDs that had periods in them. It made my account the constant victim of hacker attack, and I had to fight to repossess it several times.

When Yahoo launched their groups and mailing list functionality, I signed on to a number of them, with emails being sent directly to my Yahoo account as well as addresses associated with the account off the Yahoo system.

At some point along the way (~2002-03), as a response to this system-wide epidemic of attacks on people with periods in their IDs, Yahoo decided that they were going to simply outmode all accounts with periods in the name, and I was suddenly unable to log in to my account at all.  All of my data, profiles, and subscriptions continued to exist within the system, but I could no longer update my account.

I still continue to get emails to these old addresses over ten years later in my current accounts with no way to unsubscribe (since to do so requires logins to Yahoo to confirm).  Sure, I can filter them out with GMail, but that isn’t 100% effective all the time.

GMail has rolled out a solution today, according to Zee and Steven Hodson:

As of today you can now use the Unsubscribe tool to have GMail send an unsubscribe request on your behalf at the same time as you mark the email as spam.

From the GMail support page on this new option

You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!”

This is a welcome change for folks like me. The convoluted nature of acquisition and integration has created millions of stories like mine, I’ll wager, and aside from complex filtering techniques, there’s very little that one could do to remedy the situation.