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If I try to resubscribe that's my business.

If you add people who aren't asking to subscribe that's the definition of spam (the "unsolicited" part of "UCE")

Unfortunately the world is nowhere near that simple. Big companies (and small companies that have been around for a while) accumulate multiple lists - they merge, they fork, they get transferred from one system to another. If you use absence/presence, then a merge of (unsubscribed || subscribed) will always result in subscribed - probably not what you want.

Sorry if this little bit of sausage-making bothers you, but it's pretty much how every mailing list works everywhere.

Mailchimp did have a secret key per org specifically to calculate a email address hash id that was unique.. This hash is enough to prevent resubscription when other feeds are brought in. That could at least prevent new employees from seeing my email long after I requested privacy.

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