They've been trained by unethical spam senders that unsubscribing doesn't work.
Yes, that's where I expect to find it, but that involves scrolling down and reading through a bunch of fine print to find the right thing.
Oh, and I've had plenty of cases of using the unsubscribe link not actually work, or only unsubscribe me from one of the five lists that they autosubscribed me to, that it's hard to trust.
On the other hand, the spam button is right up top, in the same place every time, and easy to click. It's a lot faster and more user friendly, and it generally gives me better results.
A spammer. Before Can-Spam, spammers would always re-use and sell the address of someone who replied to a prior spam mailing, even if the reply was a threat of legal action.
Before Can-Spam, spammers ranked e-mail addresses read by a human higher than dead addresses (no surprise). The economics of spamming dictate that a mailing list of living humans, however acquired and however unlikely to result in sales, will be spammed again and again, simply as a bet that some fool somewhere will respond as the spammer would like.
Now that we have Can-Spam and unsubscribe links must be present, the spammers have changed tactics -- instead of collecting reply addresses known to be read by humans, they collect unsubscribe addresses known to be read by humans. Old wine in new bottles.
> are incredibly unlikely to buy anything from bona fide spam.
Yes, but let's say that an unsophisticated computer user receives, not a simple spam message, but a carefully designed phishing e-mail that is known to fool .1% of its recipients. For that scenario, e-mail addresses acquired as explained above would make perfectly suitable targets.
I can believe that what you're describing has happened before, but it's certainly not endemic. I've never personally seen anything like it.
They're interchangeable activities, and both are fueled by a ready supply of e-mail addresses.
Because that definitely happens.
In those cases I would always just hit the back button and then hit gmail's report as spam button, because fuck that. If any emailer's unsubscribe system is significantly more work for me than reporting as spam, I'm going to report it as spam and not feel the least bit of guilt about it.
(Requiring a password to unsubscribe is not can-spam compliant, by the way)
Define "works"? Does clicking "unsubscribe" for advertiser A stop mails from advertiser A? Yes, probably. But what stops advertiser A from sharing his unsubscribe list with advertiser B? Well, nothing -- it's legal and an advantage if advertiser B reciprocates by sharing his list right back.
There's nothing to keep an advertiser from sharing his "unsubscribe" list with any number of other advertisers -- the only legal requirement is that he not mail you again.
Spammers might be deplorable and slimy, but they're not stupid.
> What you describe is possible, but I really don't think it's at all common.
If it can be done, spammers will do it. I can see you're having a hard time thinking like a bottom-feeder, perfectly understandable, so to help your comprehension, I offer the Miracle Man scam:
The unsubscribe link on "legitimate" marketing emails almost always works. The unsubscribe link on marketing emails that are scams is still used to confirm that the target address is read by a live human and target further scams.
The safe assumption is that any unwanted and unexpected commercial email is, in fact, a scam and treat it as such, as the receiver does not suffer from flagging it as spam.
Obviously, this isn't good for "legitimate" email marketers, but then again, legitimate or not, their emails tend to be a waste of the receivers time and resources, just less actively harmful than the scammers. So, frustrating them as a side effect of an overvigorous defense against scammers is, even if not intended, not something that most users would weigh on the opposite side of the balance from the intended effect.