Try Unsubscribing from State Department Email Lists...

How hard is it to unsubscribe from a State Department Email List? Plenty damn hard. Read on if you've got a strong stomach.

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I've been subscribed to a certain mailing list -- the United States Department of State Consular Information Sheet mailing list -- for a few months. I would desperately like to be unsubscribed from this list. My quest to be unsubscribed will serve as a great illustration of naive usability with an unfamiliar system.

It is a useful mailing list; where the State Department sends travel alerts and updates to their Consular Information Sheet series. As I plan to be traveling internationally for the coming Spring Break, I had signed up for updates about my destination, Panama. In the process of signing up for alerts and updates, there appears what seems to be an innocent choice: the user is asked if they would like to receive such information for "Worldwide - All Countries" or choose from a list of every country on Earth. I naively chose "Worldwide - All Countries" because I was both curious in other countries and didn't want to take the time to choose "Panama" from their drop-down list. Unbenkownst to me, here began my problems.

The State Department is constantly sending out alerts and updates to its Consular Information Sheets. In fact, they send out about 20-30 such emails every few weeks. They come in batches of 3-7 emails about places like Antigua and Barbuda to Bosnia and Herzegovina. There's no way I can process this amount of information (each Consular Information Sheet is a substantial amount of text). So, at one point I realized I needed to unsubscribe from the "Worldwide - All Countries" list and pick Panama only.

One slight problem: the emails they send do not have any subscribe / unsubscribe information in them. No text in the emails refers to how one could stop receiving them. This slightly ticked me off. I thought any such service would have had to deal with people wanting to unsubscribe. Further, this is a US Government website; isn't there a law or guideline somewhere that stipulates people should be able to unsubscribe from government bulk email distribution?

I figured there must be something buried in the header of the email that would be useful for unsubscribing. For example, some mailing list software will embed header tokens for subscription information including unsubscribe links or email addresses. This email, however, had no such information.

Now I was quite pissed off. None of the hundred or so emails they had sent me gave me information that would allow me to tell them to stop sending me information. To boot, I had trashed the original email that might have had subscription management information in it (there is an initial confirmation email exchange before you can subscribe an email address). So now I had to find the website I had used a few months ago to sign up to this blasted email list. I had no idea which of the myriad of state.gov websites I had used.

Eventually, I realized that this was in the process of registering my trip with the State Department's Travel Registration service. It's not very apparent from this web site, but the "Travel Info" link in the upper right corner is where you too can sign up to get barraged by emails. I had to click on a few different links before I found the right one. Even more annoying is the website insisting to open each link in a small pop-up window instead of how I like it (in a new FireFox tab!).

So, I'm finally at where I signed up for this infernal mailing list: "Travel Information Email Distribution List". It is interesting that they feel the need to use SSL (note the https://), but they don't find the need to name the page (in the HTML) something other than "Travel Information" (try entering that into Google).

Here's the kicker: there is not a single piece of information on this site that addresses how one would unsubscribe from the list. That means 1) you can't unsubscribe using the emails they send and 2) you can't unsubscribe using the website you originally used to subscribe. It's like an information diode -- information only flows in one direction.

How the heck do I unsubscribe now? There's no contact information or "Would you like to unsubscribe?" link anywhere. Going back to the root web site there is no information about how I would unsubscribe. There is a link called "Help" which opens a FAQ in a pop-up window (I hate pop-up windows). None of the questions on the FAQ address unsubscribing from the list.

I figure I'd have to try and attempt to contact the web team at the State Department. My end-user situation has actually reached that point. I have resorted to attempting to contact the government-paid nerds that maintain state.gov and have them either unsubscribe me or contact whatever other set of government-paid nerds could do this.

So I go to www.state.gov and attempt to find some sort of "contact us" link to get in touch with the State Department's web team. Fortunately, there appears to be an entire server devoted to this purpose linked from www.state.gov. At the bottom of the page (after reading all the other links on the page) there is a "Suggestions and Website Comments" link.

Finally! A channel into where someone (or some really smart agent-based program) could help me! This is what I wrote:

Hello, I subscribed to receive consular information sheets and such at https://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs/home.asp . Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to unsubscribe from receiving these messages. That is, 1) there are no unsubscribe directions in the emails (which is bad) or header information that would lead one to believe they can unsubscribe by sending email somewhere. 2) There is no mechanism on travelregistration.state.gov to unsubscribe, only to subscribe.

As an information professional that works on issues of usability and design, this is really disappointing. As a busy person, it is even more disappointing to have had to waste a half-hour figuring out who to contact to change this situation.

If you could unsubscribe the address [redacted] from any consular information sheet (or related) emails from travelinfo@state.gov, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, if you could insert instructions into these emails as to directions to unsubscribe, you'd never have to deal with a message like this again.