Obviously not looking for hyperaccurate answers, just in general, how many people tend to unsubscribe from promotional emails and how many tick the option “I never signed up for this”?

    • Decoy321@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s more understandable when you realize that it’s less effort to mark it as spam than it is to go through all the unsubscribe hurdles.

      • DogMuffins
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        1 year ago

        Funny you say this. Every few months I search my emails for “unsubscribe” and click through each of them to… unsubscribe. I’ve always been pretty religious about this somehow believing that even though the impact may not be immediately obvious it would be in the long run the best way to avoid bullshit emails.

        Just last week I finally turned the corner and just thought fuck it, unsubscribing may be the “right” thing to do in some kind of ideal sense but it’s just a waste of time. Just mark it as spam and move on.

        • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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          1 year ago

          You’re braver than me… Most of the time “unsubscribe” is actually a signal that the spam was received by a mailbox with a live human reading it, and they automatically sign you up for several other mailing lists.

          • DogMuffins
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            1 year ago

            I don’t think this is really true.

            The vast majority of mailing lists these days are run by mailchimp or whoever who have an active interest in avoiding spamming people who have opted out.

            Also, what’s the point of sending spam emails to the type of person who unsubscribes from mailing lists? It costs nothing to send an email. Spammers don’t care whether there’s a live human at a specific address. I think if you trimmed your list to only people who had unsubscribed, you’d get a lower hit ratio than just sending to any address you can get your hands on.

            • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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              1 year ago

              The typical benefit to spammers for someone clicking the links within an email is to find out if a live person is watching them, or if the email address is still active. The people who sell address lists to spammers can actually charge more if their list is “confirmed” good active mailboxes. What good is a million email addresses if 50% or more of them go to abandoned mailboxes? But if you can pay the same price for 100,000 confirmed addresses and you get even a 1% response rate, it was money well-spent (and the seller passes your confirmed email on to a couple dozen other unscrupulous spammers).

            • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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              1 year ago

              Oh sure, I get it. The problem is determining who is legitimate and who isn’t. Since I never requested any of these spams, and even legitimate businesses will frequently send you messages even when you carefully opt out of their offer to send that spam, it’s pretty much a waste of time to bother playing these stupid games with any of them (at least in the US). If we didn’t have politicians hell-bent on stripping us of even the hard-won internet protections we’ve managed to obtain, then maybe the unsubscribe button would actually mean something here.

            • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              It’s a common request to get a list of users subscribed to a newsletter.

              It also may be commonly illegal in some countries.

    • ???@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I hate marketing emails and never willingly signed up for any of the ones I’m complaining about. It’s always been a case of a hidden box or a sudden decision to create a new type of email and opt me in automatically. That’s why I popped the question here.

    • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The unsubscribes? Or the “I never signed up for this” count

      On the unsub front, only ~30% of our mailing list engages with sends (opens the email), and I’m willing to bet up to 50% of our mailing list is “dead” emails, so really it’s 2-3x that number in practice. We have CASL to comply with so we aren’t willy nilly with adding people to our list either.