[kogepathic]

> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?

[josefx]

> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.

[Freak_NL]

When I subscribe to these I've usually already found that either they are the only shop to carry that product, or are already the cheapest. The 10% discount is just an extra at that point.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This sort of person is a spend-a-holic. They use "sales" as an excuse to engage in unnecessary discretionary spending.

[SoftTalker]

LOL yes I had a friend who would buy stuff because it was on sale and talk about how much money he "saved." I would always ask "do you have more or less money now?"

[loloquwowndueo]

Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?

[thrill]

“you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?”

So … ops normal?

[loloquwowndueo]

Hah you got me there.

[wat10000]

My email has been out there for 25+ years now. Filtering has been able to handle it for all but the first couple of years of that period.

[quesera]

This is true. I get arguments or indignation every time I say it, but spam is a solved problem, and has been for at least 20 years (thanks Paul!).

If you get more than "insignificantly little" spam in your inbox, you are using the wrong mail provider.

My email address is on every spam list under the sun. I get 600 spam messages per day[0], but only a few per week hit my inbox.

[0] It was 600/day before I made a small change to my mail configuration. Now it's only about 50/day which is few enough that, every month or so, I actually check for false positives. I occasionally see a low-value marketing list message that isn't technically spam in the sense of being entirely unsolicited, but content-wise it's not differentiable. Zero legitimate personal messages. I can live with this.

[lkbm]

I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.