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I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. S

I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. So, I mark any unwanted email as spam in Gmail immediately, and even leave bad reviews. Having my email address is not the same as having my consent. Stop trying to roofie us with malicious EULAs.

Larrikin 6mo ago
I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe. One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum. If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.
- achandlerwhite 6mo ago
  It’s because transactional email and marketing email are two different systems.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
    Sounds like an engineering problem that can be solved, and, more importantly, not my fucking problem.
  - nkrisc 6mo ago
    As the end user: not my problem, I don’t care, I don’t need the implementation details. I only care about what I see.
  - mrweasel 6mo ago
    That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains. I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.
- EGreg 6mo ago
  I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one. Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
    So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.
    - htnthrow11220 6mo ago
      Complete assumption on your part.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
        It was a question with an assumed answer which I think is pretty likely. It wasn’t presented as fact. I think at this point it’s pretty reasonable to assume the worst of email marketers, and I don’t care if you think otherwise :)
        htnthrow11220 6mo ago
        Sure. I took it as I think you intended - a statement of your understanding. I guess I just was irritated in, the moment as people are constantly reacting to unverified assumptions when there are many real things to react to. Apologies if I added to the pile of annoying things on the internet for you!
        hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
        You’ve made an unverified assumption and are reacting to it.
    - EGreg 6mo ago
      No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.
- helsinkiandrew 6mo ago
  > but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe This is a really bad business practice, people will just mark your mail as spam and the likelyhood of other people seeing your mails will drop
  - Maxion 6mo ago
    I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.
    - Pay08 6mo ago
      Because a lot of the time, it isn't.
    - bell-cot 6mo ago
      Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
    - drob518 6mo ago
      But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dspillett 6mo ago
      They understand. They also understand that they have little or no quality that most people actualy want and from their PoV quality > quantity > nothing.
- ferngodfather 6mo ago
  > If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam. Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.
  - withinboredom 6mo ago
    When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.
    - inetknght 6mo ago
      Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.
  - bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    Good. Don't send spam. If you're sending spam, then you clearly don't care about your complaint rate.
- eru 6mo ago
  > One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?
  - jonhohle 6mo ago
    Doesn’t compute. He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.
      - eru 6mo ago
        Though it's making the other customers statistically more valuable.
- mathieuh 6mo ago
  My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
- atoav 6mo ago
  This is when I send them a GDPR data request followed by a deletion request. If they send me spam after, I sue them with the receipts.
echelon 6mo ago
Are you an entrepreneur or an employee? Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work? It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around. Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this. A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google. Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark). You're all angry at the wrong people.
- em-bee 6mo ago
  so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?
  - echelon 6mo ago
    They complain a lot less. This is why B2B is easier than B2C. A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email. A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      > A consumer will pay $10/mo and > ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc. > Get angry at an email. Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.
wildzzz 6mo ago
It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.
- itopaloglu83 6mo ago
  Apps like Rollo will complain on every launch that it cannot spam you with notifications if you don’t enable it. Honda doesn’t let you find where your car is (which is a paid service) unless you share your precise location with them.
  - TheLNL 6mo ago
    The Honda thing sounds more like a technical limitation for the feature to work than a way to get permission for malicious reasons.
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    My fucking public transport app does that, it's incredibly irritating. And all the notifications I get are lotto ads.
cube00 6mo ago
>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.
- bradleyankrom 6mo ago
  LinkedIn does this and it is annoying
  - aidenn0 6mo ago
    To this day I do not have a LinkedIn account because they have historically been the most aggressive spammers of any company. The year I graduated college, almost 2/3 of the e-mails I received were LinkedIn spam.
  - leni536 6mo ago
    Linkedin sends you notifications an emails for having other unread notifications without any additional info. It's really the worst.
    - ferngodfather 6mo ago
      "Someone viewed your profile" with a blurred photo of them. So you know exactly who it is, but you won't just tell me in the email? I have to open the app/site so you can tick your engagement box for the day? So glad I'm off that shit hole. It's just full of pompous picks anyway.
  - mk12 6mo ago
    I recently tried disabling notification in LinkedIn. The designers and engineers working there who created the notifications settings are truly evil. You have to go through 14 categories. Some of them let you toggle the whole category at once, some don't. Some categories are split into 8 more subcategories.
godelski 6mo ago
Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.
- drnick1 6mo ago
  > And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. This, right here, is the solution.
  - godelski 6mo ago
    It's not a solution, it is a defense. A solution would not require the action in the first place. It is a shitty thing that we have to act this way and we shouldn't be complacent with our defenses. The solution is to make a world where we don't need to constantly defend.
armadyl 6mo ago
Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.
nathanaldensr 6mo ago
I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.
- RHSeeger 6mo ago
  > They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 6mo ago
I wrote about this recently: https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS: > ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account. That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.
staticshock 6mo ago
I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems. However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.

Larrikin 6mo ago

I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe. One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum. If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.

achandlerwhite 6mo ago
It’s because transactional email and marketing email are two different systems.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
  Sounds like an engineering problem that can be solved, and, more importantly, not my fucking problem.
- nkrisc 6mo ago
  As the end user: not my problem, I don’t care, I don’t need the implementation details. I only care about what I see.
- mrweasel 6mo ago
  That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains. I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.
EGreg 6mo ago
I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one. Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
  So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.
  - htnthrow11220 6mo ago
    Complete assumption on your part.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
      It was a question with an assumed answer which I think is pretty likely. It wasn’t presented as fact. I think at this point it’s pretty reasonable to assume the worst of email marketers, and I don’t care if you think otherwise :)
      - htnthrow11220 6mo ago
        Sure. I took it as I think you intended - a statement of your understanding. I guess I just was irritated in, the moment as people are constantly reacting to unverified assumptions when there are many real things to react to. Apologies if I added to the pile of annoying things on the internet for you!
        hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
        You’ve made an unverified assumption and are reacting to it.
  - EGreg 6mo ago
    No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.
helsinkiandrew 6mo ago
> but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe This is a really bad business practice, people will just mark your mail as spam and the likelyhood of other people seeing your mails will drop
- Maxion 6mo ago
  I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    Because a lot of the time, it isn't.
  - bell-cot 6mo ago
    Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
  - drob518 6mo ago
    But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dspillett 6mo ago
    They understand. They also understand that they have little or no quality that most people actualy want and from their PoV quality > quantity > nothing.
ferngodfather 6mo ago
> If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam. Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.
- withinboredom 6mo ago
  When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.
  - inetknght 6mo ago
    Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  Good. Don't send spam. If you're sending spam, then you clearly don't care about your complaint rate.
eru 6mo ago
> One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?
- jonhohle 6mo ago
  Doesn’t compute. He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.
    - eru 6mo ago
      Though it's making the other customers statistically more valuable.
mathieuh 6mo ago
My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
atoav 6mo ago
This is when I send them a GDPR data request followed by a deletion request. If they send me spam after, I sue them with the receipts.

echelon 6mo ago

Are you an entrepreneur or an employee? Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work? It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around. Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this. A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google. Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark). You're all angry at the wrong people.

em-bee 6mo ago
so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?
- echelon 6mo ago
  They complain a lot less. This is why B2B is easier than B2C. A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email. A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    > A consumer will pay $10/mo and > ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc. > Get angry at an email. Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.

wildzzz 6mo ago

It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.

itopaloglu83 6mo ago
Apps like Rollo will complain on every launch that it cannot spam you with notifications if you don’t enable it. Honda doesn’t let you find where your car is (which is a paid service) unless you share your precise location with them.
- TheLNL 6mo ago
  The Honda thing sounds more like a technical limitation for the feature to work than a way to get permission for malicious reasons.
- Pay08 6mo ago
  My fucking public transport app does that, it's incredibly irritating. And all the notifications I get are lotto ads.

cube00 6mo ago

>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.

bradleyankrom 6mo ago
LinkedIn does this and it is annoying
- aidenn0 6mo ago
  To this day I do not have a LinkedIn account because they have historically been the most aggressive spammers of any company. The year I graduated college, almost 2/3 of the e-mails I received were LinkedIn spam.
- leni536 6mo ago
  Linkedin sends you notifications an emails for having other unread notifications without any additional info. It's really the worst.
  - ferngodfather 6mo ago
    "Someone viewed your profile" with a blurred photo of them. So you know exactly who it is, but you won't just tell me in the email? I have to open the app/site so you can tick your engagement box for the day? So glad I'm off that shit hole. It's just full of pompous picks anyway.
- mk12 6mo ago
  I recently tried disabling notification in LinkedIn. The designers and engineers working there who created the notifications settings are truly evil. You have to go through 14 categories. Some of them let you toggle the whole category at once, some don't. Some categories are split into 8 more subcategories.

godelski 6mo ago

Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.

drnick1 6mo ago
> And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. This, right here, is the solution.
- godelski 6mo ago
  It's not a solution, it is a defense. A solution would not require the action in the first place. It is a shitty thing that we have to act this way and we shouldn't be complacent with our defenses. The solution is to make a world where we don't need to constantly defend.

armadyl 6mo ago

Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.

nathanaldensr 6mo ago

I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.

RHSeeger 6mo ago
> They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

kstrauser 6mo ago

I wrote about this recently: https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS: > ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account. That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.

staticshock 6mo ago

I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems. However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.