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I'm honestly curious: are you talking about unsubscribing from a newsletter you explicitly subscribed to? The vast majority of "newsletters" I get today are fr

I'm honestly curious: are you talking about unsubscribing from a newsletter you explicitly subscribed to? The vast majority of "newsletters" I get today are from companies that assume that I want to keep hearing from them just because I once did a one-time transaction with them. And no, it's not because I forgot to uncheck the "I want to receive blah blah blah" checkbox. I'm careful to opt out whenever there's an option for that. I don't know about other people, but I call that stuff spam. Just because it isn't an e-mail from someone who got my address from a dump and decided to cold-mail me with their crap (or phishing or other scams), doesn't mean it's not unsolicited e-mail, i.e. spam. Maybe things have changed over the years and I just wasn't paying attention, but I've trained myself not to press "unsubscribe" on something I didn't explicitly opt in to receive.

curryst 6y ago
This is roughly what I do. Unsubscribe is for things I was interested in, but am not anymore (out of the hobby, getting too many emails to manage, etc). Spam is for any kind of email I haven't opted in to receiving. That includes mail from organizations I have never requested contact with, as well as any emails I get as a result of UX dark patterns. I try to opt out, but some of them sneak past, and I don't feel bad dinging it as spam. That's the risk you take with opt-out mailing lists.
karaterobot 6y ago
A use case for manually unsubscribing is if you have an account on some site (say, an online retailer), and you don't want to run the risk that everything from them gets caught as spam, for example receipts or password resets that you do want to see. Another is if you get signed up for multiple different streams of messages ("What's New!", "Tips to Get the Most out of X", "Company Communications", "Coupons", etc.) just by signing up for an account (and, as you point out, not actually opting in for any of them explicitly). Since Gmail does not always flag all of these different things as spam, it can be more efficient to go to the "unsubscribe" page and uncheck each of these streams yourself.

curryst 6y ago

This is roughly what I do. Unsubscribe is for things I was interested in, but am not anymore (out of the hobby, getting too many emails to manage, etc). Spam is for any kind of email I haven't opted in to receiving. That includes mail from organizations I have never requested contact with, as well as any emails I get as a result of UX dark patterns. I try to opt out, but some of them sneak past, and I don't feel bad dinging it as spam. That's the risk you take with opt-out mailing lists.

karaterobot 6y ago

A use case for manually unsubscribing is if you have an account on some site (say, an online retailer), and you don't want to run the risk that everything from them gets caught as spam, for example receipts or password resets that you do want to see. Another is if you get signed up for multiple different streams of messages ("What's New!", "Tips to Get the Most out of X", "Company Communications", "Coupons", etc.) just by signing up for an account (and, as you point out, not actually opting in for any of them explicitly). Since Gmail does not always flag all of these different things as spam, it can be more efficient to go to the "unsubscribe" page and uncheck each of these streams yourself.