I am often subscribed to lists I never personally consented to. That can happen for benign reasons such as someone mistaking my email address for theirs, or more nefarious reasons.

For that reason I have no need to be “nice” to entities who send me unsolicited email. I avoid clicking any link on email I didn’t request as - just like answering the phone confirms that a live person is home - clicking “unsubscribe” just means the email address is valid and has a human behind it.

We have to stop pretending like there are humans behind our communication. If I had to guess, 99% of my email volume is generated by a machine of some sort.

reminds me of a time someone with my very uncommon last name and same first initial had signed up for skipthedishes.com with my [first initial] [last name]@gmail.com and started ordering takeout from various places local to them, halfway across the country. the website doesn't send a validation email when creating an account. this went on for months, getting a food order confirmation email with no charges on my credit card. finally I got so annoyed that I reset the password, logged in and found their cell number. I sent a polite text message describing what happened, assured that the website obscured credit card details properly and that they should change the password from [generic password].

Did you ever find out why that person signed up with an email that didn't belong to them? Did they intend to use a real email and for some reason didn't? Or did they want to use a dummy email that they didn't own?