I just went through that a few weeks ago. I ordered something and the merchant decided to start spamming me with product info on a daily basis. I thought I unchecked the "spam me" button, but I guess I was wrong.
So I unsubscribed. And got two more emails.
They were required by law to stop sending me emails within 10 business days. They carefully waited exactly 10 business days. In the mean time, they sent me two emails a day in case I might change my mind.
After two days I started marking the messages as spam. Luckily they were kind enough to provide me with an opt-out confirmation email. I was ready to sue them when they stopped right at the boundary.
Just a pure jack-ass move by the company. I'll never buy from them again.
Edit: I am very confused by the downvotes.
Were the down-votes for something else? I honestly think some naming and shaming would be a good thing in situations like this. Especially in this day and age when complaining on twitter is more and more likely to get a response from the company in question.
It was spam, plain and simple. I purchased flowers because someone passed away and suddenly I was on the list of people who are just on the verge of buying chocolate covered strawberries, but just waiting for the right discount.
Thinking about it now, do chocolate covered strawberries and price conscious consumers even go hand in hand?
Then you're much more resilient than me :P
I used to do that but I thought, since they want to deliver their message, I'll deliver mine: "I don't want your unsolicited mail and I'll flag you without hesitation".
Apparently it works.
The difference is more important to me because I get catch-all mails for addresses on a domain that are no longer good (former employees) and they MAY have actually signed up to some of these things on purpose. This doesn't mean I won't both unsubscribe and also mark as spam completely useless e-mails from companies I don't care for. But I do notice that the RIDICULOUS volume of spam I get actually goes down sometimes when I do spend some time unsubscribing from what I find seems to be from legitimate companies, the frequently repeating contacts in the spam buckets. YMMV.
It's a pretty nifty interface that will automatically look up all relevant abuse contact emails for the ip ranges and let you file and register complaints with a single click.
1. You are not interested in their product or service (Obvious)
2. You read your mail, and it is not a throw-away box. (Non-Obvious)
Unsubscribe and your email address suddenly gets commercial value that it did not have before.
This is a great technique. I was receiving Nigerian-style spam to my santander@ e-mail address, but Santander ( a big Eurobank ) denied that they had leaked the address. They blamed me, stating that I must have entered that into some web form somewhere.
So I changed my address with them to santander_2014-03-20@ and guess what.. .within a couple of weeks spam came to that one too.
No subsequent response from them as to how these are being leaked / compromised. None of my other e-mail addresses of the form companyname@ are being spammed.
I'm gradually closing my Santander accounts, I just don't trust their IT systems and processes.
I also have catch-all addresses at my domain, so I register for things as SERVICE@mydomain, so I know exactly where spam is coming from.
Except I've been doing this for years, and 90% of garbage still just comes to my plain ol' gmail address that I've been using for over a decade, which suggests that businesses finally have wised up to the fact that sending garbage to everyone who puts their email address into a form is a bad, bad idea.