And then there are spam texts. I got one yesterday from antiabortion shitbags. It mentioned that I could text back STOP, but instead I texted back a wall of hideous obscenity I C&P’d.
Seemed to get my point across.
Many countries have laws governing these practices, and reputable email-sending services stake their reputations on scrupulous compliance with those laws.
If the sender is a company or brand you recognize, it’s not likely that they’d risk their reputation by using ‘unsubscribe’ to harvest mails for resale. But there’s not much to stop an abusive operator with no reputation who is just out for some short-term gains.
File a CAN-SPAM complaint with the FTC.. They can get fined up to $50K per email, so if it’s a legitimate US business, that’s a great way to get some traction.
Of course an ‘unsubscribe’ response just confirms that you are a real recepient. Don’t you use an email service that allows you to mark things as spam?
More likely, she/he/they doesn’t give a shit as long as it works.
Echoing what others said, I’ve never had a problem unsubscribing from legit businesses. It may take a while, like up to a week or two, but they do generally stop. I don’t know if you were perhaps expecting them to stop instantly.
Another thing I’ve had happen is that I will unsubscribe from an email list, but then the next time I order something from them I forget to uncheck the “sign up to receive exciting new offers” box, and I just end up getting re-subscribed.
ETA: The legitimate third party email marketing companies, like Constant Contact and Mail Chimp, will ask why you’re unsubscribing. Usually one of the options is “I didn’t sign up for these emails”. I always wondered if there are any repercussions against the company sending the emails if too many people select that option. There’s probably some baseline level of customers who legitimately subscribed and just forgot, or “signed up” by mistake, but there mush be some threshold of people selecting that reason where they cross the line into actual spam.
If the sender is a legitimate business that I’ve bought from in the past, using the unsubscribe link has always stopped the emails without problems. If it’s a shadier sender or someone I haven’t actually interacted with, then I’d just block their emails and not bother with the unsubscribe link.
They seem to have no problem automatically starting the spam the second you reply in any way. The is NO reason why getting off the list automatically can’t be done.
And people wonder why I give a unique email address to every single company I deal with…
If they won’t unsubscribe me after two or three attempts, then the unique address for that company goes on the ban list, and they get a “no such user” error when they try to send me an email. Currently I have 128 addresses on that list. Not all of them are companies that have abused my email address, some are companies that leaked my email address to spammers.
I have; the problems are varied, and listed in order of my gut feeling for frequency:
- The unsubscribe page shows that I’m not subscribed, yet I continue to receive emails
- They unsubscribe me from that list, and subscribe me to a new one a few months later
- No unsubscribe link or
List-Unsubscribe:option - They ignore the unsubscribe request
Those are all problems with legitimate companies that I’ve done business with in some way. Many of them are major corporations.
I am an instructor at a community college. I would like to take this opportunity to bitch about textbook publishers.
First of all, I have always viewed the textbook industry as a giant racket. I only use open-source textbooks, which are 100% free to my students.
The most common type of spam I receive is from textbook publishers, trying to get me to use their books, or online platforms, or whatever else. They almost always address me by my name - I guess it’s “targeted spam?” Very rarely is there any kind of “unsubscribe” option. If I can’t unsubscribe, I reply with “remove me from whatever mailing lists YOU have put me on, and do not contact me again.”
Sometimes I’ll get a reply (“oh, sorry, we won’t contact you again”), sometimes not. I won’t hear from that particular publisher again for a few months, then they contact me again. Some keep sending me their spam after I tell them to stop; with these, I killfile their entire domain. Now that I’m typing this out, it occurs to me that I should probably just adopt this zero-tolerance policy for all of them. But anyway…
I can’t prove this, but I’m convinced that what is going on here is, periodically a publisher will go to the college directory, harvest all of the email addresses, and commence spamming. So, they are honoring my demand to unsubscribe me, until the next time they harvest my address. I partially blame the college for this, though. Disguising an email address to hide it from bots isn’t hard, but the college makes no effort to do it.
They may be harvesting it, or the college may be selling it. If you’re at a public institution, then the names and email addresses of employees may be considered a public record, and the publishers just have to know how to ask to get the list. I would not be surprised at all if the publishers just ask your school for a list of everybody teaching that semester.
I’m at a public university, and I’m convinced this happens. I few times per year I’ll get very targeted spam. Something like “we’ll be on campus selling lab supplies” which is much too targeted to be sent to just a bunch of random addresses, but also not nearly targeted enough, because I don’t buy lab supplies, though my department does.
Then there is the spam for predatory journals and conference invitations, which is probably harvested from email addresses on published papers, as the “journals” are usually somewhat related to areas I’ve published in before.
You know, I never thought of it that way. The college directory contains a statement that says something to the effect of “this directory is not to be used for commercial purposes,” so I’ve assumed that the publishers are just ignoring that and harvesting email addresses. It never occurred to me that they could be asking the college for, and getting, a list of addresses. Totally legit.
Well, whatever. I think from now on, as these things come into my inbox, I’ll just start plonking their domains. Outta sight, outta mind!
Thank you, I’ll do that.
I could provide any number of examples of electronic communications that happen almost instantly. When I subscribe to an online service, and I have to provide a confirmation email, it happens almost instantly. The unsubscribe notice doesn’t go by pony express, nor is there a bank of secretaries sitting in a backroom processing those requests by hand. There is not one good reason it can’t happen within a few minutes or seconds. Certainly before the next spamming happens.
That being said, I realize it won’t, so I’m patient. Most of the lack of unsubscribing requests have been going on for months now.
If a legit company outsources its marketing emails, there may be quite a lag between the time the email is composed, the list is forwarded, and the email vendor sends out the marketing email.
It is possible for a company to sincerely honor an ‘unsubscribe’ request, and for there still to be a lag before you’re truly flushed out of the system. It’s not unusual to get a subsequent email or three during that latency period.
Some will let you know this (with a brief explanation of why). Some won’t.
It was a lot worse back in the snail mail days when you tried to get off of a catalog company’s list. Sometimes, those things were ‘packaged’ months in advance. You might have gotten quite a few catalogs between your initial request and the final whimper of that last catalog crowding your mailbox.
These mailings happen in large scheduled batch runs of up to hundreds of millions. It takes time to schedule them up and process them. They may be scheduled out to run in several days. Once scheduled, it’s costly to modify them (relative to the business investment), so the companies lobbied for a comfortable change window in which to allow all the already-queued mail jobs to complete.
Of course you’re right, with adequate tech investment, subscribes and unsubscribes could be processed near-instantaneously. But not every company has spare cash to burn on processing a business loss more quickly. So they decided 10 days was a good operating number that wouldn’t enrage customers, and they lobbied for that in the legislation.
It’s not a tech issue, but a legal one. They are required to do it in, I think, 10 days.
The legitimate reason for the legislation is that it can take a bit to actually update the database, but it should be less than 24 hours, and probably less than an hour in 99% of cases.