How can you know that it "works"? Any company scummy enough to send spam to begin with, is capable of selling their customer data to a network of scummy companies that will do the same thing. I think most of the "unsubscribe" links are there to fulfill some legal obligation. They don't do what they're supposed to do, and might in fact be making things worse for the person who clicks them.

The only solution I've found to work, beyond the usual spam filtering, is to setup email on your own domain, and give every company a unique address. The moment you want to stop receiving email from them, you simply block their address. This deals both with the original company, and with anyone they've sold your contact information to.

Nah, unsubscribe links absolutely work. I’m religious about unsubscribing the first time I get any email notification I don’t want from anyone. The result is I basically get no unwanted emails unless I sign of for something new. Compared to basically every other email inbox I’ve ever seen where people don’t unsubscribe… yeah it’s super clear that it works.

I also use email aliases for every single account I have so if my email somehow leaks and I’m getting spam, i know exactly what account leaked it. That’s basically never happened though.

The only problem I have with unsubscribe links is that sometimes the website is straight up broken, like the link is dead or the page unresponsive, and I wonder about how far down fixing that issue is on the engineering team’s todo.

My solution to spam emails is this: https://ahmedkaddoura.com/writing/hide-my-email

I create a unique iCloud Hide My Email anytime I need to give out an email. The issue here was I signed up for my 24 Hour Fitness membership in person at the gym where the cell service was bad and I couldn't get the WiFI to work, so I begrudgingly gave the guy my real email.

While I could have easily blocked their domain, I took it as a challenge to get the emails to stop.

it’s generally a poor marketing strategy to ignore explicit requests for list removal, because users manually flag the emails as spam which is catastrophic to your domain rep and will tank deliverability. the incentives are heavily in favour of removing people who unsubscribe

from 2025-10-26 to 2026-01-29 (the day I wrote this article), no_reply@24hourfitness.com sent me 40 spam emails.

In the 33 days since I wrote this article, no_reply@24hourfitness.com sent me zero.

> How can you know that it "works"? Any company scummy enough to send spam to begin with, is capable of selling their customer data to a network of scummy companies that will do the same thing.

That’s quite a stretch for a company sending marketing email with a broken unsub mechanism.