I've just started marking these as spam. Not worth my time to go through their unsubscribe flow so they can try to trick me into not actually unsubscribing

I think that's completely appropriate. Any unwanted email is spam.

I hate to admit this, but we send a lot of email like this at work, and I always get tickets like "all of our email is being marked as spam, can you fix DNS?" Usually it is a DNS issue (people add email senders without setting up Spam Permitted From and DKIM), but nobody will address the elephant in the room that maybe users don't want to read our marketing newsletters. They likely get 100 of the same things from 100 other vendors, and at some point, enough is enough.

(Dunno if this is a public Gmail feature or one that I'm allowlisted into from working at Google in the past, but I have a "tabbed inbox" and everything like this goes in "Promotions". I look in there from time to time and see thousands of messages a day of this type. Everyone sends these and Gmail knows that nobody wants to read them. It's unfortunate, but true.)

Ha! At a previous company the marketing people swore that our mail setup was miss configured because very often people from the mkting team would get their gmail work account blocked for spam.

They were linking their accounts to use some spammy marketing software to mass send "campaigns ".

Marketing should be forbidden.

> Dunno if this is a public Gmail feature or one that I'm allowlisted into from working at Google in the past, but I have a "tabbed inbox" and everything like this goes in "Promotions"

It's apparently a public feature, since I remember being annoyed by the tabs and disabling them in Gmail preferences.

Worse, they purposely come from the same email address. So if you want meetup alerts for upcoming meetings, too bad, because now you will get all these marketing materials from the same email, which is now subscribed to various promotional lists. I already told google to put that email straight into my inbox and now I get all that junk too. This is 100% intentional because most people aren't going to click unsub per domain or start writing rules analyzing the ever changing subject line.

You can tell which companies have especially corrupt and greedy corporate cultures by how they treat your email address. Whenever I find myself witnessing behaviors like this I do my best to move off the platform and bad mouth them whenever I can.

Ah, automatic drip emails. I don't know anybody who likes these things but a lot of marketing people insist that they are a necessity.

Well they sure are a necessity for their career. It's like expecting a snake-oil salesman to admit that they're scamming you.

They probably used to work. The HN beauty pageant 5th place winner+ used to write positively about them a decade or so back, and I'm pretty sure he knew how well it worked from a very well measured and proven experience:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/

+ anybody else miss reading about the Rust Evangelism Task Force?

Or even if you didn't sign up.. I get constant emails from sales people that must have farmed my LinkedIn or something, even though I have it pretty strictly protected. Often even having scheduled a call with me without my consent. Usually for solutions I have absolutely nothing to do with if they'd actually taken the time to look at my profile.

Of course I mark them as spam and blacklist them. I often see followups months later in my trash box. It makes me feel good at least having wasted some of their time.

I buy corporate contacts from farms and I think they get a lot of them from apps that force you to upload all your contacts as the price to use them. Your personal contact information is probably in dozens of your friends and colleague's phones.

Interesting.. It could be but I kinda doubt it. I'm actually very careful with my data. The only such app I use is whatsapp. I'm very hesitant to install most apps and all the ones I use the most are from F-Droid (open source). The apps that do spying/telemetry etc I all use inside a work profile where they can't access my contacts or pictures and I run a tracking blocker inside that work profile. This makes Whatsapp awkward to use as but these days I just use a matrix bridge anyway so I can override the whatsapp label.

On LinkedIn I blocked my last name to non-contacts (everyone else it just shows my initial) because our work has a simple email address naming scheme ([email protected]). But still I get an absolute ton of them. Literally several per day. It's so annoying, though most of them are not as persistant as I mentioned in my post above.

All of them seem to be from the US by the way, and always trying to propose meetings during US timezones so they seem unaware that I'm in Europe. I'm kinda suspecting a data leak in the past or something.

Just to be clear (and you might have read it this way) - I meant that people you know, who have you in their contacts, have installed apps on their phones which pulled in all their contacts and that meant the app got your contact info from them. I'm 99% certain that's where the sites I buy my data get theirs. One of the sites won't even let me log in without giving up all my contacts, but I have a $15 phone on Boost with zero contacts on it to use in these kind of scummy scenarios.

Ahhh now I get you. Yes that is indeed very likely. I tend to focus too much on keeping my own yard safe and forget I'm walking through everyone else's too.