Cloudmark Monday announced a service designed to replace the unsubscribe option found in e-mail newsletters that subscribers have come to no longer trust.

Because of warnings from e-mail security experts over the past few years that tell e-mail users not to click on an unsubscribe link within a message because doing so can actually lead to more spam, users instead have turned to labeling newsletters that they no longer want to receive as spam - despite the fact that they signed up to receive such e-mail - so that the are relegated to the quarantine folder instead of cluttering inboxes, according to Cloudmark.

This practice leads to a greater number of false positives, or messages mistakenly categorized as spam, and complaints from newsletter publishers that legitimate subscribers are not receiving their products, both of which create headaches for ISPs managing their users’ e-mail preferences, Cloudmark says.

Cloudmark is releasing Safe Unsubscribe, a new feature to its Network Feedback System, an interface for Web-based e-mail offered by ISPs that use Cloudmark’s antispam technology to give the ISP’s subscribers the same power to report spam, phishing, and other messaging threats as users of Cloudmark’s client software, called Cloudmark Desktop, says Jamie de Guerre, technical director of program management with the company.

Safe Unsubscribe appears as a button in the Network Feedback System interface that users can click on instead of the unsubscribe link embedded in an e-mail, officials say. By clicking on this button, the subscriber notifies their ISP they no longer want to receive the newsletter, and the ISP has record of the subscription cancellation to provide to the publisher.

Cloudmark intends to release Network Feedback System with Safe Unsubscribe during the third quarter, officials say.