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Comment by colemannugent | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it counts.

My favorite filter is anything containing "unsubscribe" goes to a "Mailers" folder never to be seen.

I don't understand how people can deal with having unread emails in their inbox all the time.

Am I the only one who clicks the unsubscribe link? I live by Inbox Zero and I've been giving out my email address for over a decade (500+ sites and services in 1Password), but I very rarely receive marketing emails because I always unsubscribe. In the US, it's a law that businesses must comply with opt-out requests.

Do most people feel their inbox is too far gone to manage manually?

I ignore them mainly because it's easier. Facebook alone might send me 10 emails a day begging me to come back.

If someone was smart, clicking the unsubscribe link would only validate that the address the mailer was sent to was being used. I suspect that several services do this either via the unsubscribe link or a pixel tracker.

Yeah, but that's now illegal, so only the real reprobates do it.

Trouble is there are just so many reprobates... (See also robocalls)

Most of the unwanted mail I see (at least what makes it past the basic automated filters) is from legitimate companies who think I'd like to hear about product updates every two days rather than Viagra pills or whatever.

Unsubscribe has worked great for me too. I was not familiar with the phrase Inbox Zero before, but that is exactly how I maintain my primary email address I use for almost everything now. I typically only receive a handful of emails each day.

> but I very rarely receive marketing emails

How much of other kinds of spam do you receive? Any chance it's correlated with clicking Unsubscribe on some piece of email?

I attempt the click the unsubscribe link for everything I get but some sites seem to double down on the emails after the unsubscribe

I think this is an urban legend.

Might be an urban legend, but I do notice subscribing doesn't stop certain emails

This has a very dangerous failure mode: legitimate emails, such as people's replies to Google Groups (and similar), which either themselves end with

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to GROUP+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

or which quote other email that ends with the above.

This is a great heuristic vs tediously defining something more precise. Nice.

I set up a bunch of these types of filters. Now my inbox is squeaky clean and everything is auto organized.

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