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I was a user of unroll.me (one off cleanups of spam here and there). It automatically unsubscribes emails for you based on your preferences, etc. To do this, you give them access to your GMail account. Apparently they were scraping your GMail account for information and selling it to third parties.

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I don't think they actually unsubscribe you. They basically sit in front of your incoming email and don't pass on emails that match specific patterns. (And apparently sell that sweet, sweet anonymized data)

I am not sure if they do or do not, but their tag line is

>Instantly see a list of all your subscription emails. Unsubscribe easily from whatever you don’t want.

So, probably makes sense for them not to unsubscribe so they can still get any info on you but to the layman, it would seem they unsubscribe you from emails.

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