I recently subscribed gocomics/ucomics - wanting to get Doonesbury, Non Sequitur, etc by email delivery (I subscribe to the feeds but forget to read them). And I did finally get en email with Doonesbury ... but as I didn't get all the strips I wanted it was a failure. Not a failure worthy of a blog post, though.

However, trying to get out of the gocomics system has proven hard. The emails that gocomics send out do contain links both for unsubscribing and logging in, however:

• trying to unsubscribe yields: no success, something when wrong
• trying to login yields: username or password wrong
• trying to get a new password sent results in: email address unknown

Now, the fun part comes when you then look at the unsubscribe link in the email sent to you. Normally, for unsubscribe emails, you either expect username/email (insecure, but would work) or a temporary token (the norm). Here's the link from gocomics:

https://www.gocomics.com/email_manager?user_code=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456

Yup, that's right. Gocomics keep sending emails to people without any way for them to unsubscribe. Something tells me this policy runs danger close of being spam ... and that's exactly what I've told Gmail that these emails are.

Sending out emails with broken unsubscribe links: fail!