Or, the company hides the "unsubscribe" link in a tiny font at the bottom of the email, and it's just much simpler to hit Gmail's big "spam" button at the top.
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.