I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters. I pretty much sign up for whatever comes around, because I want to see how people are presenting themselves through email. Sometimes I get tired of a certain channel, or I just wholesale cut back on newsletters.

Recently I've noticed a couple of services make me log in to unsubscribe from emails. This is for them.

Maybe you think it will keep me from unsubscribing, maybe it's just the way your "community-management" package works. As the visitor / email recipient / unsubscriber, I don't remotely care why I'm being horribly inconvenienced:

• After clicking the "unsubscribe" button, I'm taken to a login page.
• The password to the site I never visit doesn't work. Twice.
• I click the "password help" button, and get a reset link in my email.
• I click it, create a new password, type it in again, and (hopefully) am logged in.
• Sometimes I have to actually log in after creating the password.
• There's no "unsubscribe" button to be seen.
• I go back to my email and click the "unsubscribe" button on the original email newsletter.
• I'm Unsubscribed! Yay! Sixty-five button presses later.
• I send a snarky support email to the site in question. And write a snarky blog post.

See what happened there? Now I HATE you.

You should make unsubscribing easy and painless, especially if you are a charity that relies on the goodwill of strangers. Don't make me think you're a graceless, desperate, selfish clod who is bad at the internet.