Good companies will require verification before sending anything else. Those I can ignore and they’ll go away. For the others, I make a good faith effort to unsubscribe, but a small one. They get about ten seconds for me to find the unsubscribe link, otherwise they get reported as spam. I’ve had some which won’t let me unsubscribe unless I log in to the corresponding account, which of course I can’t do.
Just remember that this stuff is spam. You’re not abusing a tool to your advantage, you’re using it the way it’s supposed to be used. Spam doesn’t have to be knockoff viagra or whatever.
I do not have any more the patience for that. If I am actually a customer of the company, I might use the unsubscribe link. If not, in my email program (claws-mail) it is two clicks to automatically delete all mails from that address. I get regularly mails from spammy recruiters who obviously scrape CVs and belong in this category. To not waste bandwidth, I put black-listed addresses also into a blacklist which is used on the server side by mail email provider. It would be neat if email clients did support that feature.
Also, there are definitely large organisations which when you unsubscribe from their list, they will simply send spam from dozens of other mail addresses. IEEE is the worst I've seen.
That's actually the likely source of the confusion, as my (example) email might be [email protected] while the serial offender is likely [email protected] (based on the salutation in the message).
[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-dot-in-your-gmail-add...
So, any combination of dots in there works. I have just had it since the Gmail beta. And Insert both with and without the dot as mistaken deliveries.
Since "My experience with Mailchimp was decidedly not like that" seems to be attracting downvotes, I'll expand on that. Mailchimp is opt out. So when I found myself on the receiving end of some local dog botique's spam (I don't have any pets, dogs or otherwise) list that was being serviced by Mailchimp I got to go through the tedious process of opting out.
Getting off of the spam list required tracking down contact info on LinkedIn and spamming the spammers. As long as companies like Mailchimp provide opt-out instead of opt-in services, it is Mailchimp and their brethren that are the bad actors. Mailchimp and Marketo have earned a spot on my smtpd_sender_restrictions blacklist.
My experience with Mailchimp was decidedly not like that.
No, I was the service.
For senders trusted by your mail provider, this may trigger feedback loops (automatically informing the sender that their e-mail is unwanted, and usually requiring them to act on that).
If e-mail deliverability providers (MailChimp etc.) are involved, they usually try to either educate or fire customers who misbehave, since they don't want to get their servers blacklisted entirely.
In general, marking as spam should increase the probability that future e-mails from this company (or, if they're smart to separate it, at least their marketing spam) will be correctly delivered to the spam folder or outright rejected at delivery.