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I receive a fair amount of legit appearing promotional email from real organizations, but organizations that I have not dealt with. In most cases the recipient appears to be a real person. In one case, I was able to verify the person is real, lives and operates a small business within a couple of hundred kilometers of where I live, and regularly frequents my city. Yet I refuse to use unsubscribe links in those cases since, aside from that one person, I have no way to differentiate between sophisticated spam and companies who don't verify email addresses on file. So the spam button it is.


I have a first.last@gmail.com and get plenty of legitimate promotional emails, one weakly-passworded credit card statement from an Indian bank each month (whose only support is an Indian phone number which I won't call), and occasional photos of "relatives" from across the world. There are about 3 or 4 people around the world with my name in various professions. I could probably do some nice identity theft if I wanted.

For the promotional stuff it's the report spam and unsubscribe button every time. I've worked in a small business that bothered to do double opt-in signups, so don't waste my time because you can't be bothered due to some vague metrics. It's spam from my POV.

For the rest it depends on my mood. If you have a noreply and it's going to take effort to reach customer service (more than an email), spam. I'm of the opinion I should be able to reply to any email and it's rude to shout at someone and then block your ears, but maybe that's old fashioned.


I also have a first.last@gmail.com address and am continually amazed at the number of people with my name who don’t seem to know their own email address and submit mine for job applications and accounts that they surely wanted to keep.




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