How many times do you flag an email from a legitimate mailing list as spam because you don’t feel like reading but and can’t be bothered with unsubscribing from the service yourself? It seems that Google is aware many of us do this and has decided to address the situation by enhancing its email client, Gmail. Every time you mark a message as spam, you will be asked if you want to allow Gmail to automatically unsubscribe you. Now that’s a really nice addition to Gmail, I think.

According to Google, you, the user, only the email messages you really want should make it to your inbox. Every a spam message makes it to your inbox, you can use the “Report Spam” button to report it to Google. This way the Mountain View-based company’s mail filtering system becomes better and better over time. Mailing lists do not fall into the spam category, but often times the newsletter you subscribed for a while ago has become more of a bother than everything. Unsubscribing from these mailing lists should, in Google;s eyes, be as simple as marking message as spam.

“Searching through individual messages for little unsubscribe links is too big a pain —you should be able to unsubscribe with a single click. So we just launched something that makes this all work better, both for Gmail users and big email senders. Now, when you report spam on a legitimate newsletter or mailing list, we'll help you unsubscribe. After clicking report spam, you'll see a little dialog like [the image below]. Clicking "Unsubscribe" will automatically send a request back to the sender so they'll stop emailing you,” explained Gmail Spam Czar, Brad Taylor.

Please note that this feature is functional only for a few senders for the time being, and is definitely not provided for actual spam messages (messages that come from spammers). Only emails originating from sources that Google knows for sure are not spam-related will present the unsubscribe option. In time the option will be extended to include more senders.