Gmail’s spam filter does a great job of getting rid of the totally illegitimate spam emails. For marketing emails from legit companies, I can unsubscribe and I won’t see them anymore. It just seems like it doesn’t work because of the sheer amount of websites that require your email address, and that automatically subscribe your email to some list when you provide it. A lot of people seem to think you shouldn’t use unsubscribe because that will spread your email around more. But for nearly every unwanted email I receive, I can trace it back to using the corresponding website with my email. So I don’t buy it. I’ve been using the same email address for basically everything for about 15 years.
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In 3 months right after giving birth I accumulated 20k spam emails in my inbox from random baby essentials and breastmilk companies. I don’t think I’ll ever use this email again.
Agreed; It’s a symptom of neglect.
If you aren’t really monitoring your inbox, fine, but if you let it go on too long, you’ll start losing your ability to catch important emails between the spam.
sometimes does spam want you to click unsubscribe and it confirms you use that email?
Not even six months ago I was getting daily emails from an airline I’d just flown with. I didn’t want to block their address as I intend to fly with them again, so I used their Unsubscribe feature…every day for two straight weeks, and their emails just kept coming. I finally called them and gave their support shit, they gave me the standard ‘I’ll pass it along’ excuse, and I continued to receive daily emails for the next month before they stopped.
Gmail is good at detecting spam but not good enough, a few of those illegitimate emails still manage sneak through to my main inbox every so often.
Unsubscribe only works for legitimate marketing emails, not fake scam ones.
Unsubscribe button doesn’t work on many companies emails
I generally advise not clicking on unsubscribe even from legit marketing. Just add them to spam and move on.
Clicking unsubscribe confirms your email is not only legit but active. They sell that info to the highest bidder.
Not correct. When you unsubscribe from a spam sender, they just sell your email to the next bidder. The cycle never ends. A few years ago I personally declared war on spam mail, and started mass unsubscribing and blocking senders. For every sender I squashed, three more popped up like a hydra. Unless you’re willing to stay dedicated for a loooong time, you’ll win the battle but lose the war.
I feel attacked
the only spam list i haven’t been able to unsubscribe from is Walgreens. the emails are all turned off on my profile and i use the unsubscribe form like every 2 weeks and those fucks continue to email me ads
Clicking unsubscribe just hint to the company that this mailbox is active
As someone who works sending marketing email, yes absolutely. Any above board company will have an unsubscribe link and google picks up on it and will usually propagate an unsubscribe button at the top of the email that uses that unsubscribe link. They have made it very easy. No more searching for the tiny unsubscribe link in the footer. Real sp gets sorted into spam and honestly a lot of real marketing gets sorted into “promotions” which is honestly where it belongs even though it makes my job harder.
Are you by chance in the EU?
No it doesn’t and no they aren’t.
Are you in other people’s mailboxes all the time? Who cares?
I’ve used the unsuscribe feature and it has stopped spam getting into my email inbox. I don’t know what others have subscribed to for it to do the opposite but it does sound very dodgy.
Agreed, every now and then I’ll take a few minutes and go through the unsubscribe process for all my morning junk emails and it will reduce it by 90% for a year or so before they reaccumulate.
I spent the last 2 months unsuscribing from every marketing email i receive and my email is clean now. Eas a hard work lol but if you keep doing it you can definitely keep.it clean
I personally have 6 email accounts and that filters everything out.
Before getting hacked I had my Gmail from like when it first came out when I was in HS. So much accumulated over the years. I just never bothered to unsubscribe from a lot of stuff although it would annoy me. At one point when I finally got a smart phone (after college, I was late on that) I thought I was deleting stuff I was actually achieving for a while 😅.
If we make it a crime for companies to collect and sell personal information, we can get rid of all of those emails
I love unsubscribing from emails. It makes me happy. I don’t mind giving you my old email for 10 percent off. And once I get my order I am unsubscribing from your list.
It’s a shame because in the older days you could sign up for a list like that and only get an email when there was a big sale event or a major product release. Now no matter what you buy you are getting an email every other day at best.
Geez I bought a mattress, I really don’t need to hear from you again for a decade, I am not Diddy.
I assume baby oil is hard to get out of mattresses
I use the unsubscribe button and it almost always works. As others have stated, most junk mail are for places you’ve signed up for something.
it does not infact, always work. I get car insurance ads/spam emails every fucking day and everytime i hit unsubscribe for weeks and they never stopped.
I just started sending them to spam instead
That doesn’t work when they never use the same email address twice. Once you’re on a list, there’s no getting off of it.
Nah I was pwned so that email will always be ripe with spam.
How incredibly naive. Obviously you haven’t been hit by real spam yet. I’ve been getting hit with salesforce emails from bogus domains for months that are impossible to filter out (since every email has a bogus, unique domain) and all unsubscribe does is tell them that your email is valid so that you get more.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case, you’re absolutely right.
“A lot of people seem to think you shouldn’t use unsubscribe because that will spread your email around more.”
– First time I hear this
– Sounds insane
I used to get lots of marketing/spam emails and now I have a completely clean inbox. The unsubscribe button usually works. When it doesn’t, I just block them. If it’s a sender that I don’t want to block because they also send me useful emails, then I create a filter (in Gmail) to just remove the emails I don’t want. I think email filters are underused, if you use them along with unsubscribing and blocking you can get a clean inbox no matter how many unwanted emails you’re currently getting.
I did for the first four or five years but I still get hit up to this day 13 years after getting this number
If you have an Apple device (at all!) it’s best to use Hide My Email for EACH new company you deal with. That way, one, you can see who sent you the spam. If it’s not a company you deal with, you can see who they sent it to, look up the dummy address, and tie it directly to the company. Unsubscribe might remove you from the first mailing list, but not all the ones you sold it to. Then, rather than asking them to remove you… you can just delete the dummy address. Then it’s gone forever and the company can never reach you again, but they’ll probably keep trying, wasting their resources. They might, when Apple responds saying that address does not exist, remove it then, but then they’re not going to sell the address again, since it’s a known bad address rather than a known good one.
I said “(at all!)” because, maybe you prefer Android to iPhone. That’s fine. Maybe you need a gaming PC and thus, Mac isn’t an option. Also fine. But, while good Android tablets exist, good luck figuring out which ones are good, and which ones will be supported for any amount of time. Best to just get the latest iPad and know it will be supported for close to a decade (and certainly usable that long). Then, in any Apple device, go into Mail and activate an Apple (@icloud) email address. I think Hide My Email requires iCloud+, but that’s pretty cheap considering what you get (and it’s included with Apple One). There might be cheaper, maybe even easier ways to do it outside of Apple, but I’m already in with a bunch of devices (iPhone, two Macs, etc.), so I can only speak to what I know and use.
No it doesn’t. I’ve pressed unsubscribe countless times and I will continue to receive the emails. They even go to the extent of creating a new email to bypass the ones I’ve blocked to continue sending me shit.
Also pressing unsubscribe sends them a message that lets them know the email address is active and you’ve read the email. Which is great news for them, now they will sell your email to 100 more companies or scammers. You are very naive to think otherwise.
“Unsubscribing” I assumed just confirmed for these spammers that yes, this indeed is a valid email.
I rarely get spam. The issue now is Google insists of ensuring that my box always has three to five ads constantly. There is never a time where my mailbox doesn’t have ads.
And what’s even more gross is when they try to hide ads way down in the email box as if it came days ago. This is done on purpose because they track how long people take to delete the ads and hiding them further down means they stick around longer and falsely boosts their stats so they can charge more for more ads.
Menagerie good does zero actual oversight of any of the ads they sell, so scams and phishing sites are becoming more a thing with their “sponsorship” and people are getting scammed and ripped off all so Google can make even more fucking money that’s they already have doing fuck all of actual value.
Bullshit. I have several email address and use one for all sign ups, but get spam on all of them and unsubscribe only works if it is a legit company to begin with.
my email provider (twc) discontinued their spam filter or something, so now mine and everyone else i know who uses that deals with the terrible clogged email. unsubscribe does nothing.
You lost me at “unsubscribe works”. Since fucking when? I swear to god it’s just decorative at this point
Linked in signs you up for 50 email chains and once you think you unsubscribed you get another one for an obscure topic
Absolutely does not
Press Unsubscribe, company unsubscribes you then adds your email to a list to then sell as genuine working addresses, which is worth more.
After taking my first round of AP Exams, I got signed up to dozens of colleges mailing lists. Thousands of spam emails.
Most work and some will also stop and then show up again in a very long time. Over time you can get it to stop eventually…but in my experience theres always one or two lists that try to hit you up again.
I use an email generator nowadays and will just throw the email address away if I think it’s got too much spam coming in