I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe.

One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum.

If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.

>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.

The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.

It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.

Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.

I wrote about this recently: https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html

We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS:

> ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.

That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.

Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed

And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.

I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems.

However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.

I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.

Are you an entrepreneur or an employee?

Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work?

It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around.

Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this.

A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google.

Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark).

You're all angry at the wrong people.