Re:Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'
by coremoff on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @07:49AM
(#26165740)
you can blame email spam from the past for this; it used to be that clicking "unsubscribe" indicated to the spammer that they had reached a valid email, and that they should sell it on to everyone else to use.
Personally, I end up clicking spam on a lot of stuff - they get one chance at unsubscribe. If I get asked to log in, or it redirects to anything other than a confirmation page, then I mark it as spam and forget about it. I get too many misdirected emails to give it any more time than that (my email address is my name, many other people share that name, and a lot of them seem to think that they have that email address too).
These slackers are the worst. Not only they cause trouble to legit email newsletters, they also affect the subscribers who want to read the email. Every time I check my gmail spam folder, I'll find at least 2-3 legit newsletters classified as spam because "It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." At least gmail makes it easy to tell them apart from email marked as spam because they were deemed malicious.