this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
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).
Just the real spammers do this tho. Legitimate shops and other businesses will unsubscribe you. I know this, because my company has many legitimate EU businesses for customers and we often help with their mails and databases. Unsubscribe is an important feature, rarely breaks and is respected when mailing automatically from common shop software as well as when they export lists of emails for complex mailings (like individual voucher codes). It's a common request to get a list of users subscribed to a newsletter.
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.
It also may be commonly illegal in some countries.