Hacker News Reader

I've never signed up for an email newsletter in 15 years online and I get 100 messages a day into my Gmail junk folder, and 10 into my inbox, masquerading as newsletters. They're spam. Pretending that people sign up for these things is a tactic the spammers are using to discourage constructive discussion.

>Pretending that people sign up for these things is a tactic the spammers are using to discourage constructive discussion.

It was quite common back before RSS feeds and always on internet. One would have newsletters delivered to a MUA and then go offline to save precious minutes from your heady 14.4kbps connection costs.

People still do sign up for newsletters. But there is also a lot of spam masquerading as requested mail.

I usually unsubscribe first, but often these newsletters, which I'm automatically placed on when I order something, or do anything on the site that includes giving out my email, don't respect the request. At that point, "mark as spam" is the appropriate option, but even that doesn't always work and I end up making a filter to delete the messages immediately.

Gmail can take a "report spam" as unsubscribe request, for some mailing lists. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-eas...