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Comment by ptmcc | Hacker News Reader

Any remotely legitimate mailing list will respect unsubscribe requests, lest they run afoul of the CAN-SPAM act and/or start getting blacklisted.

Years ago I worked at a large email service provider for bulk mailings on behalf of large customers and we took unsubscribes very seriously.

And for the really truly spam/scam emails, the unsub link is the least of your concerns since delivery and tracking pixels confirm the address is real and being used. The true spam usually doesn't even have an unsub link. In those cases mark as spam and hope that your email provider starts flagging them as spam before it ever makes it to your inbox in the future.

I'm an aggressive unsubscriber and 99% of the time it works. Very little junk flows into my inbox these days.

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> since delivery and tracking pixels confirm the address is real and being used

Does it work in Gmail? Since it doesn't load images until I athorize: https://i.imgur.com/RZ93VIU.png

Unless you use an iPhone, then there is no way to shut off images in gmail. Seems a bit strange that they'd not have that feature, when gmail was the first big provider to disable images by default.

That is inaccurate. I have disabled image loading in Gmail and this is reflected in the web interface, the Gmail Android app, the Apple Mail app, and very likely in all other mail clients. Just to be clear, you do not need an iPhone to shut off images in gmail.

I mean in the gmail app for iphone. Gmail images are off when I use a desktop, they're off when I use the andriod app, but I was surprised to see images in email when using the gmail iphone app.

Last time I went searching, I found google documentation that said there are no image options for the iphone app.

This used to be the case but was fixed earlier this year. You can now disable images in the Gmail iOS app: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?co=GENIE.Platf...

The feature is present for some time now on both major platforms, both in the Gmail app and the built-in Mail app, on (some) 3rd party mail clients, and in the web interface.

No, in that case the email client shouldn't be making any remote requests.

Although note that IIUC the gmail default is now loading remote content. (Although they do load it via a proxy so that your IP isn't shared).

> delivery and tracking pixels confirm the address is real and being used

I use Thunderbird, which doesn't load that stuff.

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