Anyone had a professional mailing list or spammer add your email and have no unsubscribe feature? Had this happen and had to find the guy on LinkedIn and tell him to remove my email.
I get a ton of UCE, probably because we use easy to guess email addresses (fname.lname@co.com) and I have a title that implies I control a budget. I would say maybe 1 in 50 complies with the CAN SPAM Act (US) or mandatory opt in rules (EU). Perhaps 1 in 25 has a "click here to unsubscribe". Occasionally, the author will have a "reply with unsubscribe and I'll take you off my list", which I suspect is just to confirm you're there to try a slightly different tactic on you. My junk/ignore rule has a couple of thousand entries (and I carry it with me from job to job). These days I find myself banning whole domains because these frauds have taken to sending multiple spams with different From addys in the same domain specifically to try and get past Outlooks default of only adding that sender to the block list.
You reminded me of something Cory Doctorow wrote about a few years ago. He wanted Mail Chimp to tell him all the mailing lists he was on and they wouldn't.
I don't know if they've changed it since then, but as soon as he mentioned it I thought that it was a great suggestion. There should definitely be a way that I, as the owner of an email address, can log into Mail Chimp and manage what they are going to send to me.
I like that idea. Reminds me of how some credit cards now show you all the stores that have re-occurring or automatic payments. I like the added transparency because then it makes it easier to opt out if needed.
Yep. And then there are the ones that come to you via a long chain of forwards (that almost read like a history of one's early academic career) where you no longer have any ability to send mail from the account that they have on file - some of the older mailing list software made it impossible to unsubscribe if you couldn't send stuff from the old address.
While a good deal of our entertainment circa 1993 (Computer Science Honours, Sydney University) centered around exploiting this delightful fact (close second: unattended terminals), I had long since figured that forging emails off a open SMTP port wasn't really still A Thing.
Oh, it most definitely still is A Thing. There have been a few notable attempts to stop it happening, but none of them have really worked completely, and they only apply to some from-domains.