The distance between the exit Google forces senders to give robots — and the one they give you.
Since February 2024, Gmail forces bulk senders to offer one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058) — a single machine request. So why does leaving still feel like a maze of logins, guilt-trips and pre-checked boxes? The Exit Gap Index measures both paths and grades the gap.
🤖 The machine path
What a robot gets: the List-Unsubscribe header Gmail requires. One click, sometimes zero. We parse it straight from the raw email.
🧑 The human path
What you get: a headless crawler walks the same unsubscribe link like a person would — counting clicks, catching login walls, guilt copy and preference mazes, screenshotting every step.
How grading works
The grade is the gap: your clicks minus the robot's clicks. Zero gap is an A; each extra step drags it toward F. A login wall is an automatic F — you can't leave an account you never made. Confirm-shaming and preference mazes each cost a letter.
- Fail-closed. No sender is graded on fewer than 3 probes spread across ≥48 hours. Below that bar the answer is ungraded — never a guess.
- Evidence or it didn't happen. Every published grade carries the raw
List-Unsubscribeheader, a step-by-step crawl log, and a screenshot per step. - Deterministic verdicts. The card copy is generated from a fixed template — no language model writes a grade.
- A dispute link on every graded page. Think we got it wrong? One email, and we re-probe.
Not collecting yet. A 150-sender work-list — news, retail, SaaS, travel, finance and media — is loaded and the grading engine is built. Collection begins once a dedicated inbox is subscribed to those senders; grading then opens as each one clears the 3-probe minimum (≥3 probes across ≥48 hours). No grades will be guessed — ungraded, not guessed.
The grade scale
"Machine: 1 click(s) (forced by Gmail). You: 4 clicks. Grade C."
A fictional sender, shown only to illustrate the card format. No real brand appears here until it has cleared the evidence bar.
While you wait
Want to see the patterns we're grading, up close? Play the Unsubscribe Museum — the dark-pattern exit exhibits, hands-on. Or try Flick's swipe-to-decide demo and see what a calm inbox feels like. Flick is on the App Store for iPhone, too.
Spotted a sender with an exit worth grading? Tell us: hey@flicked.email.