How to spot it
- Unsubscribing requires signing in, and you never had a password.
- The link goes to a preference centre with fourteen categories, none of which is all of them.
- You are unsubscribed from this campaign rather than from the sender.
- The confirmation says it may take up to thirty days, which is longer than the law allows.
- You unsubscribe, and a different brand from the same company starts writing to you.
Why it works on you
A list is an asset and it is measured by size, so the people responsible for it are rewarded for shrinking it slowly. Every extra step loses a fraction of the people who set out to leave, and none of those steps look unreasonable on their own. The preference centre is the clearest case: it presents itself as giving you control, and its actual function is to convert leaving into adjusting.
What to do
- Use your mail client's own unsubscribe button, at the top of the message, rather than the link in the footer. It talks to the sender directly and does not visit their page.
- If you must use the footer link, choose the option that says unsubscribe from all, and screenshot the confirmation.
- Mark as spam rather than unsubscribing when the sender is one you never signed up to. It is the signal that actually costs them something.
- Do not reply, and do not click to confirm you are a real person, on mail you did not expect.
Where the law stands
In the United States, CAN-SPAM requires a working opt-out mechanism in every commercial message and gives the sender ten business days to honour it. Separately, since February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders of five thousand or more messages a day to support one-click unsubscribe under RFC 8058 for marketing mail, and to honour it within two days. That is not law, it is a delivery condition, and it has changed behaviour faster than the statute did. In the European Union, consent under the GDPR must be as easy to withdraw as it was to give.
This is a description of published regulation, not legal advice, and rules in this area have changed more than once. The sources below are the primary ones.