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Comment by edweis | Hacker News Reader

Easy way to do this: search for the word "unsubscribe" in your email and delete all of them.

I did this 4 years ago on my personal email address and I never had to recover any email.

Thanks to LLMs, many of the spam messages I receive have synonyms for unsubscribe, instead of the magic word itself. I once talked to a B2B outreach company, and they touted the fact that they basically rewrite all of their emails in minor ways to evade spam filters. They pitched it as "personalization" but in reality it was just spam filter dodging.

I would say the "unsubscribe" rule still catches about 80-90% of the SPAM for me. (I thought the US had a law that any promotional email must include a link with "unsubscribe")

Then my "uninteresting sender" rules catch most of the remaining SPAM/uninteresting emails. These are accounts like "noreply" that automated emails often come from.

I had to set up a very special rule for a single company because they successfully dodged my other filters but always started with "Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information."

More details: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

> I thought the US had a law that any promotional email must include a link with "unsubscribe"

I think they need a way to unsubscribe, but doesn't have to be a link. So the circumlocution suffices, or so it seems.

This x100. I move it all to a folder called “Unsubscribe” and go through and unsubscribe from everything once in a while.

You can also make it a bit smarter by searching for the header “List-unsubscribe” instead. Less false-positives when someone forwards you an email that contains the word unsubscribe.

You have to be a little careful about this. That works for semi-ethical marketing departments, but for actual spammers it can send a signal that there's a warm body behind the email address, making it far more valuable and more likely to receive even more spam in the future.

I made a filter so the "unsubscribe" emails never reach my inbox (and thus never trigger a new mail notification)

The emails are not deleted; they are labeled and skip the inbox.

https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

A few years ago, I did the same and started unsubscribing from newsletters as soon as they arrived. Now I keep only emails in my inbox that require action - everything else I archive or delete.

Despite being terrible, Yahoo mail has a bulk "delete all from sender and block" button that's way more convenient than Gmail. Found out when helping an elderly family member with 200K unread of spam. She's blocked thousands of addresses on her own now.

I unsubscribe a lot every few years tbh but that might work better for scam emails that mention unsubscribe in order to appear legit.

By "unsubscribe" you mean "mark as spam", right? Unless you actually manually subscribed to the lists of course.

If you expand “More” in Gmail, there’s a Manage Subscriptions view that shows a list of senders along with unsubscribe buttons.

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