I'm in the same boat as you. I use a unique email alias for every single sign-up, so I know who sells my email address or sends me marketing cruft accidentally. I'm very aggressive in reporting bad actors to their mail provider if they don't honor or don't have unsubscribe links.

But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.

Not using aliases I've become very skeptical of unsubscribe links in general, even if they are in emails of "reputable" and established brands, as scammers are now spoofing regular marketing emails like that in the same way they've been doing with PayPal/Battle.net/Banks for years.

Tbh often it does not feel like it's worth the effort, due to the sheer amount of spam you end up getting the older an email address gets, it feels like trying to shovel all the water out of the ocean with a spoon.

Are there any good resources out there as to where and how to report such actors? Does this actually help/change anything? I can't imagine there being much of a shortage of shady mail providers.

The vast, vast majority of spam that I get is from otherwise perfectly reasonable companies who don't understand the law.

To that end, my steps are:

1. Try their unsubscribe, give them a few days for it to "take effect" (which is nonsense, but, so it goes)

2. Send a polite, but direct email to `postmaster@`, and usually cc `webmaster@` - it usually goes to somebody.

3. If none of the above works, pull the full email headers and `dig` around some to find their MX provider, and file a claim with `abuse@` on the provider.

That being said, again usually it's an ignorance problem. I have a friend who helps run a company that does escape rooms, and I had only provided my email on a release form. However a few months later, I started getting marketing spam from them to that email - oops. A lot of small companies don't understand the regs around marketing emails and treat them the same as all other emails.

It's not way off for you, obviously, and based on my experience in email marketing threads, not way off for a lot of the HN crowd.

But the HN crowd is a pretty interesting self-selected group of people. "You're not the target audience," as a fellow website builder used to say. And I think it's true that people who build digital products themselves might not have the same mindset about digital communications as the general public.

And email is funny in my experience... people seem to forget the emails they like to get, and preferentially remember the ones they're annoyed by.

So just out of curiosity I'd ask: do you really receive NO promo emails at all? Absolutely zero? No sales notices from Newegg or other gear sellers? Nothing from any conference you liked or are planning to attend? No airfare sales notices? No "new release" notices for software you like and use? Nothing you've intentionally opted into?

I'll give an example of a good email promo experience--I was looking to fly to New Zealand, but couldn't find a good price. A friend forwarded an sale email from Air Tahiti that had a price about half what I'd seen so far. I bought immediately.

That was a classic good promo email experience--a truly good deal, available to me before it sold out.

No, I want every email I get to be from someone I know. If it's not then hopefully it's from someone I want to get to know.

The only deviations to that are 2FA or receipt emails.

At this point I consider my general-purpose email address to be an opt-in advertising receptacle. I don't mind receiving marketing, especially when the coupons are good. However, getting the marketing when I want it for what I want at a particular point in time is tricky. Filtering through the emails becomes tedious, too, as I opt-in to more email lists.

I'd expect it depends on the source - a retailer like Amazon or a local supermarket could well send a daily offer that's interesting/useful. A more niche store might struggle to send something people want to receive even monthly.