Unsubscribe quest

P

Packard

Member
Joined
Nov 6, 2020
Messages
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I am on a quest to unsubscribe from all the emails that I have no interest in. 

The process is surprisingly easy.

The results are not.

Some, I hit “unsubscribed”, and it appears that the task is done.

Apparently,Woodpeckers, who has sent me 4 per day for a while, has each of these daily emails from a separate list.  I had to unsubscribe 4 times. It seems to have taken hold today.

Wayfair has been sending me emails, despite my unsubscribing daily since 6d/11/24.

The most egregious of the bunch is a pretty slick looking email I get several times a week from “Need to Know”, a trivia site.  Since I had never contacted them, I went on line and my suspicions were verified:  This is a scam website looking to harvest information. 

Yesterday I “unsubscribed”  and got a notice that it was accomplished. 

Today I got this from MailerDaemon:

q59Aeky.jpeg


Unlike the knight-errant, Don Quixote, who tilted at windmills, I am doing so at unwanted emails.  If I don’t succeed, it is probably because I don’t have a side-kick named Sancho (or a horse named “Rocinante”).

 
If you use Gmail, you can always mark emails that are difficult to unsubscribe from as spam.

It may take a few tries but they'll eventually end up in your spam folder when received.

Also, Gmail supports a feature known as plus addressing. This can be very useful for filtering -- and automatically deleting -- any emails that arrive with the plus address.
 
I spend a little bit of money to have my own domain, and hosting it comes with a mail server. I have all mail:

*.MyOwnDomain.com (not my actual domain)

Forwarded to my actual mail server (was gmail, now I use TutaMail, which uses E2E encryption so they can't be read on the server, even if the government wants to (and they're in Germany, which has high consumer protections).

I then register for email at every site with a unique address, such as:
Woodpeckers@MyOwnDomain.com
FOG@MyOwnDomain.com
EBay@MyOwnDomain.com
Amazon@MyOwnDomain.com
JankySite@MyOwnDomain.com
etc.

Then if unsubscribe doesn't work, I just have all mail to JankySite@MyOwnDomain.com go to trash instead on the server (or to Spam on TutaMail). A side benefit is I get to see who is selling my email or is themselves getting hacked.

Yeah, I know it's not for everyone, but once setup it's actually low maintenance and I really like the benefits of essentially infinite email addresses that I can filter out (yes, you can usually filter on sender, but when a site's been hacked, the sender changes as they Spam/Phish you).

 
smorgasbord said:
I spend a little bit of money to have my own domain, and hosting it comes with a mail server. I have all mail:

*.MyOwnDomain.com (not my actual domain)

Forwarded to my actual mail server (was gmail, now I use TutaMail, which uses E2E encryption so they can't be read on the server, even if the government wants to (and they're in Germany, which has high consumer protections).

I then register for email at every site with a unique address, such as:
Woodpeckers@MyOwnDomain.com
FOG@MyOwnDomain.com
EBay@MyOwnDomain.com
Amazon@MyOwnDomain.com
JankySite@MyOwnDomain.com
etc.

Then if unsubscribe doesn't work, I just have all mail to JankySite@MyOwnDomain.com go to trash instead on the server (or to Spam on TutaMail). A side benefit is I get to see who is selling my email or is themselves getting hacked.

Yeah, I know it's not for everyone, but once setup it's actually low maintenance and I really like the benefits of essentially infinite email addresses that I can filter out (yes, you can usually filter on sender, but when a site's been hacked, the sender changes as they Spam/Phish you).
Click to expand...

He's describing what is commonly known as a catch-all.

Great if you have your own domain and/or hosting. Complicated if you can't find the "any" key when told to "press any key".
 
Gmail works well enough and is simple enough for me.

When requesting to unsubscribe doesn’t work “delete and report spam” gets the job done.
 
Another advantage to catch-alls or plus-addressing is that if a login to a website/vendor is compromised, you have some additional protections against cross-site compromises

a) sign up for that one site/vendor again, if desired
b) change that one password, and not the ones for the rest of your accounts (assuming you don't share passwords between accounts)
c) don't worry that any other accounts on other vendor sites will get compromised because that login is only used on that one site

I don't use Apple Pay, but if I did, I would probably also use their "one-and-done" credit card number service, especially if I was buying from a new site for the first time.  I think other payment providers also offer this sort of service.  Belt and Suspenders approach.
 
A new twist on “unsubscribe”:

I got a email from Purple, the mattress company. I have not shopped for a mattress for about 10 years, so I don’t know where they got my address.

I clicked on the “unsubscribe” button and it takes me to another site called SafeOpt.  In order to opt out of the Purple mailing list, I have to sign up for SafeOpt.

It sounds like a scam.

The first page and a half on Google were all SafeOpt postings.  Then there was a scam alert site that said that SafeOpt was safe.

But I have found that the really industrious efforts to scam, create their own scam alert sites that rate them “safe”. 

There is a purported class action lawsuit inviting people who have been targeted by SafeOpt to join.  Perhaps another way to get my data.  I did not sign up.

When I click the “unsubscribe” button on the Purple site, I see this [image]:

XKWe51L.png
 
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