Somehow, my email address has apparently been sold to all sorts of “health” companies and I’m being bombarded with offers to give me a massive penis (thanks, no) or cure my thyroid problems the natural way (what thyroid problems?) or get deeper, more fulfilling sleep, and similar stuff.
If I pick Unsubscribe on these emails, does it just confirm that it’s a good address that they will then sell to someone else? I want to block them, but my freebie email service doesn’t offer that option.
Heh, the thing that grinds my gears is requesting to unsubscribe as if anyone really believes someone would voluntarily subscribe in the first place. Fuckers.
Nope, not anymore. Unchecking the box for, “Receive news and exciting offers”, doesn’t mean anything either.
Sadly, “Unsubscribe” means a lot! It means you are a live email address that answers. I’ve been told that that elevates the value of your email address in lists for other spammers.
As the monkey whose job, among other things, is the managing of client subscriptions, I spend a chunk of my day taking folks off our many lists. In fact, the “unsubscribes” are the first priority. But I get what the OP is saying and I would like to extend a heartfelt “fuck off” to all the companies that foist their advertising on me.
Then why am I told it will take 10 days to see the results?
For me, the worst part is the semi-legit businesses that send out spam, but near the bottom have a line that says “You’re receiving this email because you signed up to receive it.” The hell I did.
By semi-legit, I’m talking about a real, actual business, but also one that engages with crap like that. There’s a tech company that keeps spamming me to create an app.
They use the ‘you totally signed up for these emails’ line.
They start their spam emails with “RE: Custom app for [our business name” as if they’re getting back to me."
The owner of the company wrote at least one of the reviews on google (with his own account/name).
And that’s just what I gathered from the few spam emails I got.
The worst ones, for me, are car dealerships. The endless stream of garbage you’ll get from them if they have your email address on file is the reason why I finally set up a dedicated junk email address that I use when I’m looking at cars.
And just to annoy them back, when they spam me, I reply (often multiple times in a row and to multiple email addresses at the dealership (esp the GM)) asking them to remove me. They’ll ask me to hit the unsubscribe button and I’ll explain that I didn’t sign up for their junk mail and I’ll just keep doing this until remove my address from their list. I’ll usually end it with a not-very-subtle “this is really fucking annoying, isn’t it.”
I think that’s the difference between whoever you work for and other places that are simply harvesting email address to spam/sell.
I have a junk account for similar searches, but somehow my “good” account got out there. Dammit. Most of the crap goes to my spam folder so it’s easy to delete - I guess I won’t waste my time trying to unsubscribe.
There is such a thing as legitimate mass-emailers, and they will remove you from their list if you unsubscribe. But there are far more illegitimate ones, for whom the “unsubscribe” button is just a verification that there’s a live human checking the address, and unfortunately there’s no real way to tell the difference, especially since legitimate (but stupid) companies often contract out to the illegitimate ones (a clueless executive sees an ad in a business magazine for “online marketing specialists”, or the like, and doesn’t realize that means “spammers”).
FWIW, I avoided hitting unsubscribe for the reason Napier mentioned above – I didn’t want to acknowledge to anyone that my email was valid and I was checking it. But a few years ago I adopted the opposite policy. Any email that came in that I didn’t want I would click the unsubscribe button, religiously and without exception. And you know what? The amount of unwanted emails I got plummeted to almost nothing.
Just an anecdote I know, but I’m still a habitual unsubscriber and I swear by it.
I’ve never had any trouble with unsubscribing. But I also don’t ever click it on spam. I only click it on emails when I know where they come from.
But occasionally they are those “semi-legit” businesses that you do sign up for but then they start sending you stuff from their “partners” or just emailing me far more than they indicated they would. I still unubscribed—going to the website and everything—and those emails stopped.
I do hate that Gmail offers to unsubscribe you from an email with an unsubscribe link when you choose to mark it as spam. It’s like they don’t get that you never unsubscribe from spam, for the reason you guys have mentioned. All the dialog box does is slow you down for no reason.
OP, this might be a good time to consider switching to gmail. Google’s spam filters are uncannily good. Maybe one or two false negatives per month in my experience.
When I get promotional email from a legitimate business that I have interacted with, I unsubscribe and they almost invariably respect it.
Ditto. I never see the kinds of emails the OP is talking about because Gmail automatically filters them into the spam folder. (And even if I did I would never open them much less click on a link within to “unsubscribe”!)
Every time I’ve used the unsubscribe option it’s been for legitimate email lists that I no longer wish to receive and all that happens is the emails stop coming.
Ironically, and barely even relevant, ISTM that the recent glut of spam emails that I’ve been getting are all coming from gmail dot com addresses.
And they all seem to have a weird convention that’s sort of a semi-normal name (eg, Ramdan01357) appended with a plus (+) sign and a long string of seemingly random alphanumeric characters before the at (@) sign.
For years, I got next to no spam. In the last few months, though … BAM !
And my understanding is that Google has basically dropped out of participating in cracking down by – allegedly – no longer using their abuse [at] or phishing [at] addresses to which you once could forward this shit.
Now TO the OP 
Yeah. Legit companies will actually act on an unsubscribe link while the scammers will use it as provenance to put lipstick on that contact list pig they’re selling.
I’ve noticed this exact same thing. I will always click on unsubscribe if it is available, and will even check the headers for a List-Unsubscribe: line. I do not get very much spam.
Often times the mailing list service is legitimate and automated, even if whatever the email is selling is a scam. Because of that, unsubscribe will often work. Also because of that, I always select (if it is an option on the unsubscribe page) that the email was spam, I never signed up for it, or whatever, and report the spam to the abuse address at the mailing service.
That is almost certainly tracking information. Gmail addresses will accept anything after the +, so the spammer is probably generating a unique code for just you, or at least for that spam run. Then bounces or replies can be properly tracked.
I should add that I put “unwanted emails” into 3 categories:
“Unsubscribe” works remarkably well (again, IMHO) for the first two categories. I don’t bother with the 3rd category, as gmail will usually figure those out in short order and send them to my spam box.
I’ll admit that it’s kind of annoying to have to explicitly go into my spam folder to find great deals on penis enlargement pills but it’s a small price to pay for my (now) massive penis.
In my experience there’s true spam and annoying companies.
I’ve rarely had a problem with the annoying companies after clicking on unsubscribe, although they occasionally need a couple of clicks.
Anything that goes into my spam folder doesn’t get opened so I can’t click on unsubscribe even if it’s offered.
Yeah, me, too. Anything that doesn’t go to my spam folder is usually from a site that I bought something from. Often I do want to stay on their mailing list, so I really appreciate those companies that allow you to specify a frequency, like monthly, or for special sales. If it’s in my spam folder, and it’s a site I never went to, it gets deleted without a look.
I’ve tried many times to unsubscribe to legit businesses to no avail.
If the unsubscribe functions doesn’t work, how then to stop them?
If a news or business website is clogging my in-box with unsolicited emails, they already figure they’ve got a live one, so I don’t see the harm in unsubscribing. It may take awhile, but the e-mails generally stop.