Ask HN: Dealing with SPAM emails after you unsubscribed?

7 points by magnetic 1 year ago | 18 comments

I unsubscribed from a marketing email list over a month ago. This is from a large pharmacy chain in the US that I suspect I got enrolled into during a medication purchase.

I keep receiving marketing emails from them, and when I click "unsubscribe", the backend keeps telling me "There are no email subscriptions associated with *@*". That means it did take into account my unsubscribe request the first time around, as it doesn't find me in the DB.

So their DB doesn't have me in there, but I still get emails.

I understand the challenges of distributed systems, eventual consistency, etc... and so it appears the entity sending the email is using an "old" DB with my email address in it, that isn't sync'd yet with my removal update, but after waiting for over a month, I'm beginning to think this will never stop.

How would you deal with that?

impendia 1 year ago |

If I unsubscribe and still get marketing emails --

Or, if when I click the unsubscribe link, I am prompted to log in to an account which I never created, using a password that I do not have --

Then, with apologies to Francis Ford Coppola, my reaction is to mark as spam with extreme prejudice.

Leftium 1 year ago |

I have two simple email rules/filters that filter out most marketing emails. They should work for your emails.

Even if you don't use gmail, you can still apply the general strategy: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

While the rules could automatically delete/mark the emails as read, I just tag them with labels and "skip" the inbox so I don't get an email notification.

I can mark all of them as read with a single keystroke after skimming the subject lines for anything important/interesting.

brudgers 1 year ago |

I usually just mark unsolicited emails as spam. Only occasionally do I bother to unsubscribe. For example when there the email seems intended mostly to address my interests and not just the result of a policy to spam anyone and everyone.

pavel_lishin 1 year ago |

> How would you deal with that?

1. Start marking them as spam, to train my email provider that this sender is to be treated as such (correctly).

2. Set up filters to automatically archive/mark-as-read those emails.

3. If I was having a particularly slow week with nothing else to do, start finding the emails of engineers & managers at various responsible entities, and making it their problem every time an email comes in.

ValtteriL 1 year ago |

I usually just reject mail from the address or even the whole domain on the email server level. This causes them to receive mail rejection notifications and my inbox stays at zero. Zoho workspace makes this easy to do.

I could just block them silently, but reject notifications add to their spam score on email provider level and may help them reconsider their approach.

Curiously, one spammer rotated over 10 similar domains in a span of 6 months as I kept blocking them. Assuming their spam software did it automatically.

LinuxBender 1 year ago |

View the headers and use regex (if your mail provides that level of details in rules) to block the the PTR records and reverse DNS from sending to you. If not then block emails based on keywords in the subject or body. If that isn't an option contact your mail provider and have them block it. Or find a better mail provider that gives you better filter rule options. Also start submitting the headers/emails to Spamcop. [1]

[1] - https://www.spamcop.net/

pwg 1 year ago |

Name and shame. The large pharmacy chain is Walgreens.

I've been very tempted to look up the email for their legal department and send them an explanation of how they are in violation of the CAN-SPAM law.

solardev 1 year ago | |

There's no government left to care about that.

pwg 1 year ago | | |

While I agree with the sentiment, the hope would be their legal dept. being spooked just enough to rein in the advertising dept. just a bit. Lawyers, in general, do not tend to like risk.

cpach 1 year ago |

What are the options from your mail provider? E.g. can you filter it and send directly to trash?

On Gmail I would just flag it as spam and go on with my day.

entrepy123 1 year ago |

Add a rule/filter in your mail account settings that sends mail from that domain/sender/subject/etc. to the Trash/Junk/SPAM folder (or 'Delete' action).

JohnFen 1 year ago |

I just set up filters (on my mailserver, but you could do it in your mailreader) to automatically delete all emails from such misbehaving senders. Then I don't even have to see them.

magnetic 1 year ago | |

That is a reasonable strategy, but I need to figure out a way to delete SPAM emails only.

I still need transactional emails to go through, unless I change pharmacies, which isn't impossible to do, but has downsides that may be more painful than having to "Mark As Spam" a couple of times a week.

JohnFen 1 year ago | | |

With the right filter, you could have the best of both worlds. Assuming that the company spamming you has a set format or some standard text in their spam that isn't in their other emails, you could filter based on that.

solardev 1 year ago |

Just block them and move on. Not worth your time or mental energy.

Qem 1 year ago |

Thunderbird bayesian filter works fine for me. You only need to remember marking new spam it does not recognize yet, so it learns to properly classify it.

nicbou 1 year ago |

Mark as spam and block sender.