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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

If they don't want to make it easy to unsubscribe me immediately I just report it as spam. Hopefully that goes into Gmail's whatever "big data" of spammers and starts getting them classified as spam across the entire network.

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It does.

Can't speak for Gmail specifically but we ran a biggish email operation a few years ago (sending real estate alerts) and were notified when some of the big providers users marked our emails as spam.

So unless things have changed, the newsletter providers are notified.

Why not simply always report as spam? I have a zero strike policy with spammers. I’m not going to even try your “unsubscribe” link. You’re going to get marked as spam if you’re spamming me, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re 0.000001% more along the way towards not being able to have your emails received.

If I subscribed, I'll try to unsubscribe. That's just fair.

If the newsletter appeared from nowhere, then yes, it's spam.

Yea, and it’s insulting to even call it “unsubscribe” since I did not subscribe in the first place! The word itself subtly tries to shift blame onto the victim, as if it’s their fault they are getting spammed.

Like those Robocalls that leave you a voicemail featuring someone clearly reading from a script, intimating that they're "returning your call" about something you know for a fact you never called about?

Go away Janice, I don't need an extended vehicle warranty, and no I didn't contact you for information.

They often subscribe you by default when you register. A lot of services do this. For me that's a spam, for them it is a clause in terms of service.

Now that an adversary can know this about you, I suggest you learn how spearphishing campaigns work.

You enter your email on a website that already sent you an email? What would that achieve?

Moreover, clicking the link is all which is necessary for a successful spearphish.

How so? If there's a zero-day in the browser? Or is there that much value in just getting their IP address/user-agent?

Browsers often have zero days.

Not only do browsers often have zero days but many people configure their browsers to let the server do basically anything it wants. Service workers, WebGL, Webasm, javascript.

Any of those have been demonstrated to be capable of spectre/meltdown/etc. Hope your passwords/ssh keys aren't stored in RAM.

If I signed up, I'll unsubscribe (that's on me -- I asked for it, it's not unsolicited). Otherwise, it's marked as spam.

If I don't want it, and I certainly don't want any more, then it's spam. Doesn't matter if it's showing up because I forgot to unclick a checkbox somewhere and so isn't technically "unsolicited". Ain't no-one got time to help marketers lie to them. Try not sending me stuff I don't want.

It’s a bit extreme to say that any email that you don’t want is spam. I joined a mailing list years ago for an open source project I was interested in, and recently I stopped using it. I don’t think those emails suddenly became spam because my interest changed. Of course I unsubscribed through their system, I didn’t report it as spam.

I agree. And if I "forgot" to unclick a checkbox somewhere it's almost certainly because the website used some dark pattern to make it easy to get wrong.

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