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.
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.