I get TONS of unwanted email everyday. Of course I get TONS of unwanted junk snail mail as well. The snail mail keeps the post office in business though. It's always a dilemma for me regrading the unsubscribe. You're right about them now knowing that it's an active email so you hesitate yet it's annoying to keep getting it. Lately I've been unsubscribing.

QiMinset's response is just below me so I glanced at it. He has a good point. The new generation not only does not use snail mail, but their mode of communication is texting. I hate texting. My fingers are too fat I guess but I do it for my younguns.

~Debbi

Great information Phil... I use Gmail and when I receive an unwanted email I just don't bother opening it.

After about a month of doing this Gmail sends a little message saying that I haven't opened an email from this particular sender for a month and gives the option not to receive any more... so I click yep, and no more emails are received from this sender!!

Have a wonderful weekend my friend! :-)

I never subscribe "with your best e-mail address" when I first enroll to any site. Always use a "junk"-mailbox. If, later you are sure you want to be on their mailing list, you can always change your email address.

Whenever I do want to unsubscribe and I don't get any joy out of them, I add them to my "Junk Mail" auto-responder and in my introduction, I specifically state they are receiving email from me as my request to unsubscribe has been ignored.

Congratulate and thank them for joining my mailing list in return and that they should expect receiving affiliate offers from me in future.

If they complain, I send a screen shot of my unsubscribe request, highlighting the fact that they did not honor my request in the first place.

Yes, it's an effort, but I do believe in building an audit trail (gather evidence to substantiate your case).

Hi, Phil

There's really no definitive solution but I have a few things I do to make unwanted emails easier to deal with.

I use Gmail email accounts whenever possible, add labels to different types of emails (unwanted emails get a bright red label called "unsubscribed") and then sort everything into one of the Gmail categories (primary, social, promotions, updates, & forums) using the Gmail "move" function.

Spam (including emails I consider "unsubscribed") get sorted into the "forums" category. Google's AI algorithm for Gmail is pretty good about putting things in the correct category, even if the sender uses a different email address.

I quickly scan the forums category every week or so, looking for something that doesn't have that bright red label and relocate (move) it, then I bulk delete everything else.

I find this works better than creating a filter to automatically delete the unwanted email, but I do create filters for the emails I want, giving them specific color labels and sending them to the various categories.

I read all my email on my iPhone in the Gmail app, which allows me to quickly "swipe" away emails that I don't consider spam but I'm not particularly interested in, based on the subject heading.

All my medical email (from other physicians, etc.) goes through the Care New England platform and my engineering email goes through the IEEE platform. CNE & IEEE emails then get redirected to my Gmail address so I don't have to log into three separate accounts.

It sounds cumbersome and time-consuming but once you get it all set up it's quicker than trying to manually unsubscribe to everything with limited success.

I have also tried services that unsubscribe for you but they don't work as well and some of them have security concerns.

Frank

As someone responsible for the email marketing in my 9-5, if the email is coming from a company you actually use, please, please, please use the UNSUBSCRIBE link when it is included in the email (usually located at the bottom).
In our case, it's a very clear link, in caps, underlined and the "usual" blue link colour.
We have approximately 46,000 on our list and if someone clicks the unsubscribe link or emails us asking us to remove them from promotional emails it's fantastic! It's either automatically actioned, or I manually do it for them if they email.
What hurts out mailing stats is when people incorrectly report it as spam when it isn't. Please always leave the spam report as a last option i.e. they haven't included an unsubscribe link or reply-to email address. Or, if it really is an unsolicited email from a company you've never provided your email address to (and agreed to receive emails from!).
From my point of view, unsubscribes aren't always bad to receive - it means we don't waste time and resources targeting product updates messages to uninterested people. Most importantly, it means we won't annoy you again.
The only glitch I've encountered is when we changed the platform we sent from and the export from the first didn't correctly provided data on previous unsubscriptions. Luckily, the particular campaign was only to a small subsection of our customers so I was able to rectify it quickly.
Also, only a handful of people complained and I personally replied to explain what had gone wrong then reassured them they'd been properly removed this time (and their preference permanently noted on their account). All of them replied and thanked me 🙂