• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 26, 2026

Empathy and humanity are viewed as bad things by certain political philosophers. And one suspects that some mass email marketers agree with them. 

But they shouldn’t, according to the veteran email expert Ryan Phelan. 

When you ignore these virtues, “you also take away one of email’s superpowers: building one-to-one connections in that most personal of spaces — the email inbox,” Ryan writes in Mar Tech. “We must show our customers we know them and understand their needs and aspirations.”

This is true not only for basic message copy, but also the unsubscribe function, he adds. 

Anyone who has tried to streamline their email inbox and prevent new messages from pouring in knows what he is talking about. 

Ryan faced a personal challenge. His father and uncle passed away within weeks of each other last summer.  

“As part of my duties as an executor for both estates, I had to clean out their email inboxes to make sorting through the clutter easier,” he writes. “I could have done what most civilians do — mass-delete all messages and shut down the accounts.

“I didn’t do that because I needed to find and process bills and either close or switch over accounts, so I combed through each inbox and unsubscribed from every email list I could find.

During that process, Ryan encountered “dozens of unsubscribe flows,” he continues. “Some worked. A surprising number didn’t, especially those for big-name brands. I encountered way too many 404 pages.”

Companies asked for the reason for the unsubscribe, and gave a standard checklist of options. But none had a “death” reason. 

He wrote, “This person is deceased” or “The subscriber passed away.” So far, he hasn’t heard back from one company. 

This goes beyond empathy—it’s also about simple competence. 

Maybe I’m wrong. But my understanding of general best practices, if not the law, is that unsubscribing should be a one-click affair. But I’ve noticed that many sites offer partial unsubscribes in the event you want to still receive some emails. Sometimes you have to go to entirely different sites. 

It can be maddening at times, although newsletter unsubscribes usually do offer the one-click opt-out. Like many people, I suspect, I don’t even recall subscribing to some emails. They’re filled with content in which I have not the slightest bit of interest. 

You have to wonder: if Ryan Phelan has this problem, with his fount of email knowledge, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Hang in there, Ryan.