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Comment by actionablefiber | Hacker News Reader

Any ideas for why that email appeared in your inbox? It doesn't look like it's a phishing attack - "Updates to YouTube's Terms of Service" is a subject line that guarantees that precisely zero people will even bother opening it.

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An attempt at increasing reputation? Nobody is going to mark that as a spam.

I'm sure many people will mark anything they are not interested in as spam.

My rule: If there isn't a prominent, 1-click unsubscribe link in an email, it gets marked as spam.

If I click unsubscribe, and the form asks me to fill in information, it gets marked as spam. No, I'm not filling in my email, let alone completing a CAPTCHA, to ask you to stop sending me emails.

However, I don't click an unsubscribe link in an email where I suspect the unsubscribe link is itself a scam to collect information.

I've been toying with just automatically trashing any email that contains the string "unsubscribe", in any context.

This actually sounds like the most plausible reason considering there is really no other incentive to do this.

Perhaps to check if the inbox is valid? Sending from some random domain you risk having your mail silently dropped. If the server thinks you're youtube, then you're going to get through.

Phishing bored lawyers?

Close to zero, which is lots for a spammer.

Yes, but those likely to read ToS updates are not going to be the demographic that likely falls for scams; proper scammers target the population that is less adept at technology so they don't notice they're being duped.

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