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It sometimes can be better to mark it as spam. There was a thing a while back where the unsubscribe link was just verifying that you still check that email acco

It sometimes can be better to mark it as spam. There was a thing a while back where the unsubscribe link was just verifying that you still check that email account, and you click on links, so they'd send you more spam.

MaysonL 9y ago
Mark spam as spam. Unsubscribe from content you signed up for and no longer want.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  And how many things are "signed up for you"? There's a lot of those. It's getting harder to tell what I actually signed up for, and what I thought I was signing up for.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    If they say "signed up for you," then it's spam -- it's unsolicited commercial email. Unless you designated someone else as your agent to sign you up for crap on the web, then you didn't solicit it.
sowbug 9y ago
That's closer to an urban legend than the truth. If you once gave them your email address, they are generally good about honoring unsubscribe requests. It's expensive for them to create a high-quality customer list, so they're not going to play games that put them into a gray area. Don't be lazy and classify them as spam on this basis, because it fails to distinguish good-faith businesses from actual spammers. Senders who bought, stole, or brute-forced your email address are a different story. For them it's just a numbers game. They are, by definition, spammers and should be treated as such. There is a final group of senders who you did once interact with but who show these behaviors: 1. They are too incompetent to keep the unsubscribe server running; 2. They broke the the mail template so it doesn't point to a valid URL; 3. They fail to control subscription preferences within their own company so that the marketing department keeps using the same old list even though months of unsubscription requests have accrued since then; 4. (My pet peeve) They take you to a blank form that asks for personally identifying information in order to unsubscribe, rather than embedding an identifying token in the email's unsubscribe link. Out of principle, I will not enter PII into any form on the other side of an email link, even if it comes from someone in my family. It's too easy to fall victim to phishing, and I resent any sender that puts me in that situation. If a business asks for any PII to unsubscribe, I close the tab and mark the email as spam. Any of those get marked as spam. Their intent was not to spam me, but I can't do business with incompetent senders.

MaysonL 9y ago

Mark spam as spam. Unsubscribe from content you signed up for and no longer want.

CaptSpify 9y ago
And how many things are "signed up for you"? There's a lot of those. It's getting harder to tell what I actually signed up for, and what I thought I was signing up for.
- sowbug 9y ago
  If they say "signed up for you," then it's spam -- it's unsolicited commercial email. Unless you designated someone else as your agent to sign you up for crap on the web, then you didn't solicit it.

sowbug 9y ago

That's closer to an urban legend than the truth. If you once gave them your email address, they are generally good about honoring unsubscribe requests. It's expensive for them to create a high-quality customer list, so they're not going to play games that put them into a gray area. Don't be lazy and classify them as spam on this basis, because it fails to distinguish good-faith businesses from actual spammers. Senders who bought, stole, or brute-forced your email address are a different story. For them it's just a numbers game. They are, by definition, spammers and should be treated as such. There is a final group of senders who you did once interact with but who show these behaviors: 1. They are too incompetent to keep the unsubscribe server running; 2. They broke the the mail template so it doesn't point to a valid URL; 3. They fail to control subscription preferences within their own company so that the marketing department keeps using the same old list even though months of unsubscription requests have accrued since then; 4. (My pet peeve) They take you to a blank form that asks for personally identifying information in order to unsubscribe, rather than embedding an identifying token in the email's unsubscribe link. Out of principle, I will not enter PII into any form on the other side of an email link, even if it comes from someone in my family. It's too easy to fall victim to phishing, and I resent any sender that puts me in that situation. If a business asks for any PII to unsubscribe, I close the tab and mark the email as spam. Any of those get marked as spam. Their intent was not to spam me, but I can't do business with incompetent senders.