I've experienced similar issues with sites where someone else used my e-mail address to sign-up for something, I purposefully did not follow the authorization URL, and the companies have flatly refused to delete my fraudulent accounts or remove me from their mailing lists.
One in particular tried to tell me to reset the password on the account so that I could sign in and opt-out of the mailing lists. I refused, saying that doing so would be acknowledging the account as mine and putting the onus on me to manage something I never signed up for. They refused to budge, despite numerous escalations.
If you are using a major e-mail provider, try to mark their spam as spam server-side.
For senders trusted by your mail provider, this may trigger feedback loops (automatically informing the sender that their e-mail is unwanted, and usually requiring them to act on that).
If e-mail deliverability providers (MailChimp etc.) are involved, they usually try to either educate or fire customers who misbehave, since they don't want to get their servers blacklisted entirely.
In general, marking as spam should increase the probability that future e-mails from this company (or, if they're smart to separate it, at least their marketing spam) will be correctly delivered to the spam folder or outright rejected at delivery.
I apparently have a somewhat common name, and so my Gmail account first.last@gmail.com gets a fair amount of misdirected email due to idiots with a similar address. (As best I can tell, most of them have something like first.last42@gmail.com and forget the number.)
Good companies will require verification before sending anything else. Those I can ignore and they’ll go away. For the others, I make a good faith effort to unsubscribe, but a small one. They get about ten seconds for me to find the unsubscribe link, otherwise they get reported as spam. I’ve had some which won’t let me unsubscribe unless I log in to the corresponding account, which of course I can’t do.
Just remember that this stuff is spam. You’re not abusing a tool to your advantage, you’re using it the way it’s supposed to be used. Spam doesn’t have to be knockoff viagra or whatever.
> For the others, I make a good faith effort to unsubscribe, but a small one. They get about ten seconds for me to find the unsubscribe link, otherwise they get reported as spam.
I do not have any more the patience for that. If I am actually a customer of the company, I might use the unsubscribe link. If not, in my email program (claws-mail) it is two clicks to automatically delete all mails from that address. I get regularly mails from spammy recruiters who obviously scrape CVs and belong in this category. To not waste bandwidth, I put black-listed addresses also into a blacklist which is used on the server side by mail email provider. It would be neat if email clients did support that feature.
Also, there are definitely large organisations which when you unsubscribe from their list, they will simply send spam from dozens of other mail addresses. IEEE is the worst I've seen.
I'm in the same boat. People have used my gmail address when opening bank accounts, buying cars and even buying apartments! It has an upside though. If you try to map my email address to a real identity you get a great many "verified" wrong answers.
I have a very common first.last@gmail.com (I wonder who has that literal address? Poor person.). The things I have gotten by accident are amazing. Highly sensitive loan applications, retirement accounts, travel documents, even a thread for a consultant doing highly sensitive plant improvements to a GM plant complete with access to gigs of plant info docs, process management and other proprietary information (vehicle design things). I have no idea, but these guys should be glad I an a benevolent entity :)
I'm perplexed as to how you even got first.last@gmail.com, because I'm pretty sure Gmail disregards the dot and will send anything with your address to firstlast@gmail.com[0].
That's actually the likely source of the confusion, as my (example) email might be giraffe@gmail.com while the serial offender is likely g.iraffe@gmail.com (based on the salutation in the message).
> If e-mail deliverability providers (MailChimp etc.) are involved, they usually try to either educate or fire customers who misbehave, since they don't want to get their servers blacklisted entirely.
Since "My experience with Mailchimp was decidedly not like that" seems to be attracting downvotes, I'll expand on that. Mailchimp is opt out. So when I found myself on the receiving end of some local dog botique's spam (I don't have any pets, dogs or otherwise) list that was being serviced by Mailchimp I got to go through the tedious process of opting out.
Getting off of the spam list required tracking down contact info on LinkedIn and spamming the spammers. As long as companies like Mailchimp provide opt-out instead of opt-in services, it is Mailchimp and their brethren that are the bad actors. Mailchimp and Marketo have earned a spot on my smtpd_sender_restrictions blacklist.
> If e-mail deliverability providers (MailChimp etc.) are involved, they usually try to either educate or fire customers who misbehave, since they don't want to get their servers blacklisted entirely.
My experience with Mailchimp was decidedly not like that.
Were you buying Mailchimp services? It would be interesting to hear from Mailchimp customers how enthusiastic Mailchimp is at handling spam complaints.
I registered my own domain and switched my email over to a service that lets me generate arbitrary email aliases. When I go to a site or have to otherwise give an email address, I create a new unique alias just for that service. This lets me track where they are leaking my email to, and lets me blackhole the whole site if needed.
I've been doing a similar thing for year with the gmail feature that lets you add "+anything" to the end of your email address. If someone starts spamming myrealemail+thethingIusedforthatsite@gmail.com, it's easy to create a filter to trash it automatically.
I've tried the catchall method on a domain I control, but got way too much spam people trying random addresses.
I have first@last.io. My mail provider (fast mail) supports sending mail to service@first.last.io. This then ends up in a folder called service, or in my inbox.
If a site has broken email validation and I absolutely positively NEED to use it, then I'll grudgingly create an explicit alias just for that site. Otherwise, I find a competitor that doesn't screw this up. In both cases, I end up passively-aggressively tweeting about the company's email validation, though.
I’ve done each of these things and they work great.
1. Go up the chain. Email the head of technology and head of marketing for the company. Tell them that what they are doing is unacceptable.
2. Look up the email service provider. Find their abuse address. Bring it up with them directly.
3. Mark as spam. I give companies one chance to get it right after I unsubscribe. If I keep getting emails I start to mark as spam. If I still get emails I escalate to #1 or #2
One in particular tried to tell me to reset the password on the account so that I could sign in and opt-out of the mailing lists. I refused, saying that doing so would be acknowledging the account as mine and putting the onus on me to manage something I never signed up for. They refused to budge, despite numerous escalations.
I swear I feel more like Hank Hill every day.