Can ThxNoThx stop all junk email?

First some definitions:

• Spam: unwanted emails sent by anyone that you have not had prior contact with/did not voluntarily give them your email address
• Transactional emails*: "facilitates an already agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer about an ongoing transaction". Basically, if you do business with a company, they can send you email about the purchases/services/etc. They cannot send you marketing material just because you purchased something. Some examples of transactional emails:
  • Receipts
  • Updates about subscriptions
  • Notices about purchases you've already made (eg info about a specific event).
  • NOT marketing for other events or products you haven't previously signed up for/purchased
• Marketing/Commercial emails*: "advertises or promotes a commercial product or service"

ThxNoThx can help you reduce the amount of marketing emails you receive. Once you click unsubscribe in your thxnothx inbox or you forward us an email from your email account to unsubscribe@, we will use the unsubscribe link in that email to unsubscribe you. If you indicate you want to unsubscribe from a company's marketing email multiple times, we will assume that there is a problem getting you unsubscribed and we will contact that company on your behalf to get you unsubscribed.

What is the CAN-SPAM Act? What about laws in other countries?

You can find more information about various countries' spam laws here:

• USA: CAN-SPAM ACT - friendly visual intro, official non-lawyer explanation (ftc.gov), or legal explanation
• Canada: CASL
• EU GDPR: email section

Why isn't this free?

There are costs associated with receiving, filtering, and storing emails for users. I have to cover those somehow, and the options are either to have ads or to charge for the service.

Given that the general intent of ThxNoThx is to help you reduce the amount of marketing in your inbox (and thus your life), it seems contradictory for that service to be showing you ads :)

If you'd really like a free, ad-supported subscription option, write us a note! email: adsplease at sunnyporch.dev. We might consider adding a free tier, but always plan to have a paid tier.

Can't I just unsubscribe from emails myself?

You certainly can! However, in talking to friends and family I discovered that people don't really trust that unsubscribe works. I personally find it annoying to hunt for the tiny unsubscribe link and then navigate whatever nonsense a particular unsubscribe page has going on. I'm also never really sure if an unsubscribe really worked since it can take 2 weeks to actually kick in, so it's hard to really trust it/feel like it's "solved" when I unsubscribe from an email list.

• Making unsubscribe truly one click from the inbox makes it so much easier to unsubscribe. You don't even have to open up the email!
• We will keep track of emails you mark for unsubscribe to see if more emails are sent by that company. If the unsubscribe attempt seems to have failed, we will go the extra mile and follow up with that company to get them to stop sending you email

I also know from experience that sometimes unsubscribe functionality gets broken and the company may not realize it. Even for a well intentioned company, it's not a feature that's used internally, so you won't usually discover that it's broken. By tracking unsubscribe problems across multiple users, ThxNoThx can bring a bit more evidence to a conversation with an email sender that something is broken.

If I unsubscribe, will I miss important emails?

The short answer is that you'll continue to get important emails like receipts and package tracking information, and only the advertising emails will stop.

"Unsubscribing from emails" for almost all* companies means that you will stop receiving their marketing emails - anything that "advertises or promotes a commercial product or service".

It's industry standard practice (and in the best interest of companies) to continue sending you transactional emails ("facilitates an already agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer about an ongoing transaction") regardless of whether you unsubscribe or not. US law (CAN-SPAM) specifically allows transactional emails to continue after the user unsubscribes from emails. If you really want to stop transactional emails you'll likely need to completely delete your account at a company.

*A caveat: the behavior of unsubscribe is ultimately decided by individual companies, so there might be a few companies who will actually stop sending you any emails whatsoever, but we here at ThxNoThx haven't seen a case where someone has missed an important email because they've unsubscribed.

How does RealUnsubscribe work?

When you forward an email to unsubscribe@thxnothx.com or mark an email for unsubscribe in the UI, we take the following steps:

1. Our system examines it to determine who sent it and if there are any unsubscribe headers/links in the email.
2. If the automation cannot determine what the unsubscribe URL is, someone on our team will examine the email to see if they can find that information.
3. The system will open that URL and complete the unsubscribe process for you. If our automation cannot complete that process automatically, a member of our team will complete that task.

I'm an email marketer - why shouldn't I block emails in the @thxnothx.com domain?

I (Stephen, the founder of ThxNoThx) spent 2 years working on email marketing tools myself, as well as an additional year building email marekting & notification services for a consumer-scale website. So I understand what your goals are and think that ThxNoThx represents a nice balance between email users' goals and marketing goals.

Here's why you shouldn't block our email addresses:

1. This is not a throwaway email service. Your users will always be reachable at the address that you give them, and emails sent to ThxNoThx addresses will end up in summary emails sent to the users.
2. If you'd like, I'd be happy to provide open rate %s for emails from your service. This will be highly accurate since it will be based on our records of who opened emails sent by your service. Send an email to team (at) thxnothx.com and we'll get that process started. (If you're a user reading this: note that this will never be per-user data, the only information they will get is "10% of our users who received email X opened the email to read it.")

I have my own domain, can you take over receiving emails at that domain?

We definitely plan to support that! Get in touch with us to discuss how to set that up: team (at) thxnothx (dot) com

How do I log into the site?

ThxNoThx doesn't use passwords for logging in - we send a "magic link" to your email address. To be sent a magic link:

1. Click "Sign in" at the top of the web site (if you don't see it, then you're already signed in) or Sign in now
2. We'll send you a magic link to your non-thxnothx email address
3. Once you click that link, you're logged in on that device and will remain logged in unless you use the "Sign out" option.

That's it! It's super simple. If you need to log in on multiple devices you can request a link on each device.

I've been asked about how secure this login method is. It's just as secure as standard password login, since on those sites you can always just request a password reset link be sent to your email address. So in either system, if you can access the user's email inbox, you can access the user's account.

Receive Actions

ThxNoThx provides a couple options for what happens when you receive an email at your ThxNoThx address:

• Forward: Emails will be immediately forwarded to your non-ThxNoThx email inbox.
• Bundle: You will get an email from ThxNoThx that contains a summary of all the bundled emails you've received. You can always view bundled emails in your inbox.
• Block: Emails will be ignored by ThxNoThx and you won't see them in your inbox/summary emails/etc. This is different from unsubscribing from a sender: if you unsubscribe from a sender but then are sent another email, ThxNoThx will still show that email in the inbox (this is useful because you may receive emails about future business you do with a company), but no email from blocked senders will appear in your inbox.
• Newsletter: Emails will be shown in your Newsletters view rather than in your inbox.

You can tell ThxNoThx to bundle/forward/block all emails for a particular sender (ie "all emails from walmart.com") as well as for your entire account ("I want all emails I receive to be bundled, unless I have a specific bundling setting for that sender")