Even if unsubscribe “works”, and you get removed from the list, you just get added to the list again for the next campaign.
If it’s not something you subscribed to then it’s spam.
I think it’s more like you get added to a thousand new lists if you unsubscribe. “Oh hey this email address is actually active!”
That’s… Not what I’ll talking about.
If I can reasonably believe I did subscribe by mistake, unsubscribe. If there is no chance I willing consented to it, report as spam.
Hitting ‘unsubscribe’:
- Takes you to website where you have to go through multiple steps of inquisition: your email, are you sure, want to just get less, are you really sure, give us a reason, ok it’s queued up and we’ll get to it whenever.
Or,
- Hey, this is a live email. Ok, whatever, thanks. We’ll make more money selling this email to data brokers. Mission accomplished.
If on gmail, hit unsubscribe.
If you don’t think you ever subscribed to it, even by mistake, report it as spam.
Also they know your email is live if you loaded the unique HTML content of the email from their server.
I mark so much crap as spam. I used to use the + trick so I would know who sold my email to them but they appear to have gotten better, now it’s straight to spam with the bullshit.
Or, hear me out: neither. Make your devices cry when they try to display the number of unopened emails you have.
Or I could set a filter to auto delete them…
This is the way.
Unsubscribe button is untrustworthy
If you’re not in my whitelist, you don’t get to my inbox.
Simple.
I’ve wanted to do this too, but I’m worried a website will have different domain names that I didn’t know about. Say I subscribe to lemmy.com. Then I find out a month later that lemmy.com sends me important alerts from from lemmyalerts.com. If I had only whitelisted lemmy.com, I would have missed those alerts.
Has this ever happened to you? Do you have a strategy for these?
If someone emails from different domains like that, then they’ve missed one of the biggest security lessons in how to use the internet: only trust domains that you already know well and/or can verify. If you get an email from YourBank.kp or YourBankOfficialReallyIPromiseBro.com then don’t trust it.
The burden of proof lies with the sender to convince you they are who they say they are, by providing verifiable info and not using a domain you have to go whois.
I think PayPal sends emails from PayPalMail.com or something like that, so when a friend asked me if it was real, I said probably not, but when I investigated it further I found the morons from PayPal did actually (sometimes?) email from another domain. It makes sense however that a company like PayPal, so closely connected to psychotic conman Musk, would do something that idiotic.
Must be nice living in Canada. When I was there I heard you guys bitching about your administrations a lot, but at least the administrative stuff was pretty straightforward (I almost experience culture shock when I went to do some administrative stuff to regularize my social security situation, and student visa a few years later, and got all the correct answers from talking to a single person, who didn’t even try to backhandedly redirect me to some other service.
Over here in France, we get official, sometimes of crucial importance, communications that look like textbook phishing (strange wording, embedding links to shady-ass looking domain names).
Hell, with the latest gov data breach (which is like, the 5th one this year or something?) they sent us mails with anti-phishing good practices telling stuff like “never click on a link from a mail, go to the official website by yourself and find the thing from there” then follow up with a link…
Sometimes they’ll use extremely shady links too (sorry, my dear Republic, but I ain’t clicking a link to something that doesn’t end in .gouv.fr from you)
Cherry on top : they recently passed a law exposing private companies to huge fines for not respecting stuff like breaches disclosures etc, then they (the government and/or related institutions) admitted to no wrongdoings after getting caught burying the evidence and not respecting basic security best practices. The only one that got some traction is the latest one because the hacker allegedly managed to extract all the financial data of the country’s top tax evaders
All of my non-whitelisted email goes into the trash bin. I do peruse it, but mostly for a different use case. If I get subjects that say “critical alert” (etc), and it seems legitimate, then I just go to that service and see if something is actually going on. So basically everything in that box is suspect at best. Next, I tend to leave these emails unproved since there are so many. This way they auto-delete with no extra effort. Ex, I have an app that I see alerts in the app when I want to (on my timeline), but it also sends me emails. No way I can stop that behavior, and I can’t really stop using the app, so I just let them auto-purge without building any special rules.
Now, if I see an email in there, and it correlates with an actual site/app notification, then I have the option to whitelist the source. I really don’t find myself doing that very often.
It’s a pretty low-effort way to distinguish known sources, and to auto purge stuff I don’t want to strictly block.
Can I please have a whitelist on my inbox?
I was seriously the latter group, until I took the time to unsub from GOG’s countless barrage of emails. I’m still subbed to 2-Minute Tabletop because their emails don’t show up too much and usually have more in them than just sales and wishlist games.
Deleting is way too much hassle. I mark them as read (sometimes) and move on. Until I get annoyed enough to go on an unsubscribe rampage
It’s a Black Friday tradition. By that date, everyone starts sending offers so that’s a good time to unsubscribe from all of that.
Assuming unsubscribe works and isn’t just confirming your email is valid.
Or the unsubscribe button is a phishing scam
Has to in Canada.
Or what? What’s the enforcement on that, especially if the sender isn’t in Canada?
If some anonymous spam farm in India sends you more spam after you unsubscribe, what exactly is Canada going to do about it?
Spam and malicious emails aren’t the same as a newsletter from a genuine company. I’d know if I subscribed to something, I’m not even opening spam let alone click a link in it. Genuine companies will follow the law in Canada and other developed countries.
I live in Canada. Walmart.ca won’t stop sending me emails no matter how many times I click unsubscribe. Never even signed up, just bought something from them once. I’m still glad there’s a law about this, but companies are absolutely not following it reliably.
That sounds like someone is using your email on purchases to refresh it.
If they’re not complying, report them. That’s how the government knows there’s something to deal with.
Maybe it’s Walmart.com and not ca that’s continuing? A large corporation shouldn’t be making a mistake like that, it’s costly.
Genuine companies
Yeah okay think about what he said and what you are saying. Canada cant enforce the law against the non genuine companies based offshore. When you click unsubscribe often you don’t know if its a genuine company or not.
I know, which is why i included
I’d know if I subscribed to something, I’m not even opening spam let alone click a link in it.
Perhaps I could have written that more clearly. Despite not all spam and malicious emails being easy to spot, for me the opposite is very true: i can spot whether I subscribed to something or not. If I believe I didn’t, it goes straight to spam. If it turns out i barely or ever read something I subscribed to, I rather unsubscribe then delete or move to spam each individual message every time I get one.
Spam and malicious emails aren’t the same as a newsletter
And weren’t differentiated in the chain so far. You want to keep those goal posts in place, bud.
No, someone brought up spam incorrectly when the topic was only about subscribed first emails. Like going to bestbuy and buying something with your email.
Spam is all automatically sorted and I don’t see anyways,
You kinda have to subscribe to something to be able to unsubscribe from it dude….
How am i moving a goal post? I’m making that differentiation because it wasn’t made in the initial comment:
Assuming unsubscribe works and isn’t just confirming your email is valid.
If you assume something, context matters. Later in the chain it is pointed out one context could be spammers:
If some anonymous spam farm in India sends you more spam after you unsubscribe, what exactly is Canada going to do about it?
Which is why I’m pointing out that is not the only possible context and you can make a differentiation. Nowhere am I saying unsubscribe buttons always work or are always to be trusted, nowhere am I saying this only applies to newsletters from genuine companies. You can only move goalposts once it is established where those posts are in the first place, bud.
Why would you subscribe to one of those in the first place?
Spam and subscribeable emails are totally different things and issues.
Is Canada gonna reach out through tcp/ip and arrest them?
Anything you could want to know is here.
Governments can block tcp and ISPs if they refuse to comply. They can also use it against trade relations or other negotiations as well too.
If you’re trying to make a joke instead of genuinely asking a question, well…. Okay.
The USA literally uses copyright, DRM and other stuff as bargaining chips with other countries, why would you not think the same could happen elsewhere?
Hahahahaha. I manage a mail server and they are never going to be able to block all the compromised accounts these scumbags use. I geo blocked the whole world and all domains except for the main top level ones and I still get regular fake phishing attempts using all manner of otherwise legitimate servers and domains. It doesn’t matter what any law says. These people don’t care and they are not going to be stopped often. I get a huge number these days from aws and google. As much as I would love to I can’t block them.
It’s one thing for a billion dollar company to get the government to take someone down, and another thing entirely for an individual to get the government to take down a company.
That’s why you report them? When a trend is happening the government steps in.
There’s examples on the pages.
TBH I just set up a Thunderbird filter to move anything from their domain into my bullshit folder. Takes about the same amount of time as unsubscribing and I know for sure it’ll work. 👍
Mark it as spam and let your email client do the work. Clicking unsubscribe can have negative consequences like confirming to the spammer that you are an actual human.
This is the way.
This is the way.
I just mark as spam
If the unsubscribe doesn’t work, absolutely
Things I know I signed up for, on purpose or inadvertently, get one attempt at unsubscribing. If it fails, they’re spam and get treated as such. I never actually sign up for these things, but I accept that they put me on these lists when I make purchases or engage with them in some other way. I accept it, but I don’t like it - and my patience with them when I try to unsubscribe is extremely limited.
But things I “signed up” for and things Gmail asks me if I want to unsubscribe from - are two very different things. Gmail asks me that question several times a week. I “sign up” for things at a rate more like several times a year. Things that I didn’t subscribe to that want me to unsubscribe are just scammers trying to polish their lists up and I’m not gonna help them.
Warning unsubcribe buttons can be phishing attempts.
Login to Unsubscribe
Forbidden by law in the EU, one-click unsubscribe they call it.
It appears to be banned in the US under 15 USC 7704(a)(3) because it’s neither one click nor does it allow the user to open a menu to select the types of messages they want to receive: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7704