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Marketing emails often come with an unsubscribe link in the footer. This is what Twitter uses:

You can also unsubscribe to these emails or change your notification settings.

"Unsubscribe from these emails" seems far more natural to me because unsubscribing is an act of removal. Add to, remove from. Is there a consensus on this?

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    Don't expect crap you read on the Web to be grammatical, especially crap from Twitter.
    – Robusto
    Commented Feb 4, 2013 at 21:07
  • I agree with @Robusto here, lot of garbage is there on web. I support him when he says Twitter is full of crap.
    – Fr0zenFyr
    Commented May 9, 2013 at 7:18

1 Answer 1

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Affordances and auxiliaries peculiar to one verb are often found with other words derived from it.

Since subscribe takes to as a transitivizing preposition, so does unsubscribe.

  • She had subscribed to it for years.
  • She unsubscribed to it after they published that letter.

However, since unsubscribe has the negative sense of reversing a subscription, and cutting a connection -- in other words, moving away from -- the general ablative transitivizer from is also sanctioned, although it's not correct with subscribe.

  • She unsubscribed from it after they published that letter.
  • *She subscribed from it after they published that letter.
  • She was divorced from him shortly afterward.
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  • General albative transitivizer! Upvoted.
    – Matt Montag
    Commented Feb 5, 2013 at 3:45
  • Ab 'from' + lātus 'taken' (perf pple of ferō, ferre, tulī, lātus 'carry, take'). Very straightforward Latin. This is what happened to the ablative case nouns in Romance languages when the cases were lost; they changed to prepositional phrases with (usually) a.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Feb 5, 2013 at 5:09
  • John, so what's the bottom line? For unsubscribe, is "from" now the correct form, either way is now recognized as correct, or "from" is technically wrong but common practice?
    – fixer1234
    Commented May 15, 2017 at 21:42
  • There is no "technically", nor any "correct", nor any "bottom line". Language is not law, not even thought. It's just personal habits of various people with varying ideas of how to proceed. The Academy may put "Which preposition is to to be used with unsubscribe" on its agenda, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 15, 2017 at 21:52
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    @MattMontag You upvoted just because he used a word you can't even spell? :-P
    – Evgeniy Berezovsky
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 2:31

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