[sofixa]

> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)

I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.

[dwroberts]

I’ve never had this notification before. I get the direct unsubscribe button if I actually view the email, but not a warning I’m not reading them

[Taek]

It does? I have never once seen this in my life.

[sofixa]

Might be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.

[ghc]

American here. Seen it a number of times on both mobile and web.

[ghc]

There's a pretty long waiting period before it does this. I'm not sure what the time required is, but I think it's at least 3 months. And it only does this if you don't interact with the newsletter at all.

Just speculation, but it's possible if you also use a non-web/non-gmail-app client it might suppress these notifications.