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Comment by nobody_nothing | Hacker News Reader

> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.

Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.

Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.

(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P

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A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work, it's probably one of these issues:

- "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed.

- You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc). - You are unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).

- Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look into it (for our company, this would be me).

Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who their host is and report them for abuse.

Honestly I just press the unsubscribe button in apple mail or the link in the message and if those don’t work, mark it as spam.

I also consider having to make any extra action on the website as the link not working.

There's another: a business creates new lists and adds old customers to it. Some popular websites have multiple categories of marketing lists that can be unsubscribed from one by one.

It's definitely possible I'm misremembering. I've donated multiple times and it'd be reasonable for them to re-add me upon donation. But I'm pretty sure I've unsubscribed since my last donation in 2019.

I don't even bother unsubscribing anymore, I just add a Gmail filter to auto-delete all messages from that address.

Gmail rules are powerful and underutilized. I have a bunch of them set up to handle different tasks that used to be manual.

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