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
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.
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 trust/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 letters, 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
I just report as spam and block
Let them deal with the spamlist fallout
That’s exactly what I do, report as spam and move on. They get auto deleted after 30 days from the spam folder.
Unsubscribe takes way too long.
Oooohhh… clearly you have never donated to progressive causes… because deleting this shit FOREVER is not the only way to keep the inbox clean. Unsubscribing is a waste of time… they have lots and lots of telephone numbers.
And before you tell me I’m not a progressive anymore… I’m still donating… but it’s cash only for these pricks.
Ethical people wouldn’t ignore unsubscriptions, or obfuscate how they contact you.
If they do, then you know you failed at recognizing unethical people (and you’ll hopefully investigate more in the future), and that you should never donate again to that organization and to stop being a member.
I am so used to the unsubscribe button not even doing anything that it is actually easier to simply add the sender to my block list.
If it’s something I know I subscribed to, I’ll unsubscribe once, then immediately setup a filter to automatically mark anything new coming from that sender as spam.
If it’s something I didn’t subscribe to, I just skip straight to the filter.
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.
I spend a moment blocking their domain in postfix.
Use email masking and block the mask.
More and more automated spam systems are getting wise to that and dropping any text after the +
Warning unsubcribe buttons can be phishing attempts.
I have a script to lookup the whois info for the sending IP address. Forward the message, with headers to them, saying “unsubscribe”, then block that IP with a firewall.
