[chrismorgan]

Whether it helps or not—the typical contact like this hasn’t been a human for decades now. What I’m seeing these days is materially almost identical to what went out ten years ago. Basic form letter with a cover sentence or paragraph of either no relevance, or a tenuous but normally ill-researched claim at relevance.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Yeah, but in the last few months, they've definitely been better targeted. I've found myself reading at least the first few lines to figure out where they got their info about me from.

[insane_dreamer]

yeah; just that we'll get 5x of these now that it's even easier to generate more "real-human-sounding" ones.

IMO, the best way to deal with these, if using gMail, is not marking them as spam. Instead, I drag them into the Promotions tab, answer "yes" to classify all emails from the subject as such, and that's it. Promotions == Trash.

I don't open/read such emails (I scan the first few words shown in the Inbox line, then dispense), so good luck trying to cold contact me for legitimate purposes.

[chrismorgan]

Why not mark them as spam?

[insane_dreamer]

because I haven't found the spam filter to be bullet proof, whereas I have found the filtering into Promotions (aka my spam folder) to work flawlessly

It's also slightly easier to drag and drop them into Promotions than mark them as spam.

I could of course do both but that's just more work

[muzani]

Gmail product managers are scratching their heads reading this.