[Magilla Marketing] Now that Microsoft has added an unsubscribe button to its e-mail user interface, marketers are calling for other Internet service providers — especially Yahoo! and AOL — to follow suit.

Microsoft last week became the first e-mail box provider to answer e-mail marketers’ calls to include an unsubscribe button in its interface so consumers will be less likely to mistakenly report permission-based commercial e-mail as spam.

“We hope that all ISPs follow suit and we get to a level of accountability that is consistent across the Internet,” said Ben Isaacson, privacy and compliance leader for e-mail service provider Cheetahmail’s parent Experian.

Microsoft’s unsubscribe link began appearing last week in place of the report-and-delete button on some e-mails in Windows Live, the new free e-mail service replacing Hotmail.

Josh Baer, chief technology officer of Datran Media, said he and others in the e-mail industry have been lobbying ISPs to put an unsubscribe button in their user interfaces for years.

“For a year or two, they’ve all been saying ‘yeah, that’s a good idea,’ but they’ve been very noncommittal,” he said. “Hotmail’s stepping up to the plate, when are AOL and Yahoo! going to follow?”

Kelley Podboy, a spokeswoman for Yahoo!, said the portal has no plans to add an unsubscribe button to its user interface.

>”Through the ‘This is Spam/This is Not Spam’ buttons, our users tell us what is/is not spam and we continually adjust our filtering technology based on that user feedback,” she wrote in an e-mail

However, consumers often use the buttons to prevent mailers’ messages from arriving even though they signed up for the e-mail. In a recent Return Path survey, nearly 79% of consumers admitted that they have hit the “spam” or “junk” e-mail button to get rid of e-mail they don’t want. Nearly 37% do it as a way to unsubscribe from things they had asked to receive, according to Return Path.

Each complaint counts as a black mark against the sender. Too many complaints result in ISPs blocking the sender’s e-mail.

However, a consumer hitting the Windows Live unsubscribe button will not register as a spam complaint, according to Microsoft.

E-mail executives are surprised that Microsoft was first out of the gate with this development.

“I really expected it to come from AOL first because they were first with the ‘report spam’ button,” said Baer.

AOL’s postmaster, Charles Stiles, failed to respond to two e-mails asking for comment.

Under Microsoft’s new scheme, e-mail arriving at Microsoft with a valid list-unsubscribe function — a line of code that allows ISPs to automatically forward unsubscribe requests back to the sender — will get an unsubscribe link as long as it passes Microsoft’s internal “reputation” test determining the sender is not a spammer.

If the e-mail does not arrive with a valid list-unsubscribe in its header, it will contain the complaint button and no unsubscribe link.

The product is in beta and could change, however.

>No matter what form the final product takes, the addition of an unsubscribe link is a significant step forward for non-spamming e-mail marketers, said Baer, who eight years ago wrote the list-unsubscribe technique Microsoft is using.

“There might be some things that they [Microsoft] might tweak, but we’re excited that they’re even thinking about this,” said Baer.

He added that Microsoft executives originally balked at adding an unsubscribe option to their user interface because they didn’t want to confuse their e-mail users.

“I never thought about giving just the unsubscribe option for trusted messages only,” said Baer. “To me, that looks like a great solution.”

Though e-mail deliverability company Return Path’s Sender Score Certified system is Microsoft’s official reputation service provider, e-mailers do not have to be certified by Return Path to get the unsubscribe link, according to Microsoft. Return Path’s whitelist is reportedly simply one of the criteria Microsoft will use to determine if the sender’s reputation is good enough to get the unsubscribe link.

Microsoft is in the midst of moving its Hotmail address holders to Windows Live. The change reportedly should be completed in the next four to six months.

Now that Microsoft has added an unsubscribe button to its e-mail user interface, marketers are calling for other Internet service providers