[bradknowles]

The vast majority of e-mail that I get which claims to have an unsubscribe process is actually spam. If you try to unsubscribe from it, all you've done is proven that your e-mail address is live and monitored, and so you now get your address resold to 100x more spammers.

So, I wouldn't recommend doing that sort of process unless you can be 100% certain that the message isn't actually spam, and you can properly unsubscribe from it.

[EduardoBautista]

What service do you use for your email? I would amazed if these types of emails are getting past gmails spam filtering to the point it becomes the “vast majority” with an unsubscribe process.

In my case, the vast majority does have a legitimate unsubscribe link.

[bradknowles]

I have a gmail account, but I use it for almost nothing. I don't trust them as far as I can throw the company. All it takes is one tiny infraction of some rule you never knew about, and suddenly you lose your entire Gmail account, your youtube account, and everything else associated with gmail.

My main account is on a personal vanity domain that I've owned since 1995, through the ISP that was my main BBS at the time, and they had just recently gotten on the Internet. I was also working at AOL as their Sr. Internet Mail Administrator, and I knew how hard it was to run a reasonably good mail system, and I didn't want to have to do all that work all over again on my personal vanity domain. The anti-spam system used by my ISP is decent, but not great. On top of that, I layer a Bayesian-based anti-spam program that ties into my mail client, for further filtering. Plus my client has anti-spam filtering of its own, and I have hundreds and hundreds of manual filtering rules that I've written over the decades.

Even with all those filtering layers, I still get at least a dozen or more spam mail messages that get past all the defenses, and I have to manually delete them and run them through the retraining algorithms.

And I still don't trust any "unsubscribe me" link that I see, unless I know for sure that I signed up for service with that company.

[earthling8118]

I have a gmail that gets hundreds of spam messages daily. It filters out a lot but just as many get through. It is impossible to deal with them all so if I ever need a message I have to rely on it being recent enough