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.