I think unsubscribing to stuff is perhaps the most important thing you can do to keep your inbox in check. When I see people’s messy ass inboxes, they are full of crap they should just unsubscribe from. They don’t because it feels like an unwinnable battle. It’s not, it’s winnable. My advice is still: fight. Smash that unsubscribe button.
There is a smidge of nuance here that also keeps people away from ever clicking that unsubscribe button. Folk wisdom. At some point it became part of people’s general understanding that unsubscribing from spam is actually bad. And it stands to reason for actual spam. If some criminal is sending out vast quantities of garbage mail in order to lure in clicks in order to scam you in some way, hitting an unsubscribe link in those emails sends a request to a criminals computer saying “Hey! This is a real person! Put them on the real person list!”. Then not only will it not work, you might get more spam. It’s like leaving a weeks worth a newspapers on your front stoop: criminals will notice and the results are undesirable.
So you need a sense of if an email is actual spam or if it’s just unwanted email of some sort (a notification, promotion, etc). That’s not intuitive for everyone, but as a general rule, if you have a spam catcher and it didn’t catch it, it’s probably not “real” spam and you should use the unsubscribe link.
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