Or just click the unsubscribe button myself? Is forwarding the email really any easier than unsubscribing yourself?
In all seriousness, here’s what I do to combat Insidious Mailing List Spam. It’s kinda simple.
1. Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. Never use it for any shopping or anything. This is your email address. There is no mailbox anxiety because you get one email a day to this address and it’s from your dad and you love him.
2. Get another one for mailing lists. Crucially, using a rule, mark every new mail as read on receipt. There is no mailbox anxiety because the “read me” or “keep me unread until I’ve actioned” or whatever is gone. Totally gone. Need to do a thing with an email? Figure out a way outside your inbox to track that.
I started this accidentally about a year ago and it’s a revelation.
The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless).
Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc).
This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)
I tried this and don’t recommend it.
Yeah, you get the advantage of knowing who leaked your address. But I don’t care. If the ‘spam and lists’ address gets too spammy, I’ll just create another.
The disadvantage is that you have to configure a mail client to send from this address if you ever want to do that, and I found myself doing it far more often than I imagined. Need to write back to a store regarding a transaction? Frequently enough. To my health insurance company for some reason? Of course.
No, the idea is to remove as much friction as possible. This adds friction. Keep it simple.
Disclaimer: just a satisfied customer.
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It works until someone sends an email with cat photos to your secret address and all their contact list, and forget to use bcc.
(I was probably using my Yahoo! address 25 years ago.)
It makes certain things more complicated, like authenticating against certain services, or if someone sends and invitation to one of your domain emails, but it works just fine 95% of the time.
I just switched to Fastmail and was pleasantly surprised with their solution. You can set up wildcard response aliases so that if you receive an email to random.onetime@mydomain.net, when you hit reply, it automatically sends from the random.onetime@mydomain.net.
Also filter all emails with unsubscribe in their body to that folder. Works like a charm.