What I call the "narrow unsubscribe", now used just about everywhere. The unsubscribe link at the bottom of that spam email you received? It will unsubscribe you... from that particular type of email from that company. Usually that category is so small that you'll still get roughly the same amount of email; unsubscribing from additional categories requires logging into the website (or worse).
LinkedIn is a big player here[1], of course, and if you add the fact that they add new categories of spam all the time (automatically opting in everyone, of course), it become just about impossible to fully unsubscribe from their email.
Viacom is a particularly bad player here[2]. If you've signed up for Hulu Plus, you've probably seen these emails. If you click the unsubscribe link on one of them, it will unsubscribe you from that particular Viacom property. Viacom holds dozens, potentially hundreds of properties. To unsubscribe from all of them, you have to go to each property in a big list, uncheck all the subscriptions, and save. And of course, these are all separate pages, and they likely do the LinkedIn automatically-opt-in strategy for new properties. They just went into a spam filter on my email.
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What I call the "narrow unsubscribe", now used just about everywhere. The unsubscribe link at the bottom of that spam email you received? It will unsubscribe you... from that particular type of email from that company. Usually that category is so small that you'll still get roughly the same amount of email; unsubscribing from additional categories requires logging into the website (or worse).
LinkedIn is a big player here[1], of course, and if you add the fact that they add new categories of spam all the time (automatically opting in everyone, of course), it become just about impossible to fully unsubscribe from their email.
Viacom is a particularly bad player here[2]. If you've signed up for Hulu Plus, you've probably seen these emails. If you click the unsubscribe link on one of them, it will unsubscribe you from that particular Viacom property. Viacom holds dozens, potentially hundreds of properties. To unsubscribe from all of them, you have to go to each property in a big list, uncheck all the subscriptions, and save. And of course, these are all separate pages, and they likely do the LinkedIn automatically-opt-in strategy for new properties. They just went into a spam filter on my email.
1. https://getsatisfaction.com/linkedin/topics/how_do_i_stop_re...
2. http://www.techbyter.com/today/archives/436