Asklemmy

Do you psychos not unsubscribe from things? Or mark them as spam?

Part of the reason you're getting so many is because they're making it to your inbox. That's enough. A LOT of marketers care way more about deliverability than click rate. If their email is getting through, they're likely to increase volume because it helps deliverability. Going to dead emails that never read them doesn't matter, it means they can get into boxes with the people who may actually read them. Everyone that doesn't unsub or mark as spam is helping their deliverability reputation, and keeps them off spam filters.

If you're getting emails you don't want MARK. THEM. AS. SPAM.

When registering for stuff I always pay very close attention to not check the "send me offers and promotions" checkbox, unless I am genuinely interested.

If any gets by, or if any by default signs you up, whenever I get an email from them I'll go to the bottom of the email and unsubscribe.

This means that all the marketing emails are from things that I genuinely have interest on. Sometimes, even these things get too spammy and unsubscribe from those that kinda act abusive. They aren't your "FREE LIMITED IPHONES! OPEN NOW!" kind of emails. Those I mark as spam, hoping to improve the detection system on whatever email client, and move on.

So, essentially, I have "free time" to read those as much as you and I have "free time" to come here on lemmy. It's something I am interested on.

Edit: just realised I didn't specifically answer your questions but it's basically:

1. Just a regular guy.
2. I am interested in the ones I do get.
3. Sometimes before sleep or when I go to the bathroom I look at emails/lemmy/others.

Edit2: I think there's a distinction to make here between SPAM emails and Newsletters. SPAM emails are mostly sent based on leaked emails lists or something. Newsletters, you usually sign up for them (knowingly or not).

Edit3: Bonus ProTip - If you use Gmail you can get a + sign after your email and before the @ symbol and whatever your write on there is ignored. So for instance myemail+otherwords@gmail.com will still forward to myemail@gmail.com . This means you can kind of find out who leaked your email if you register as "email+websitename@gmail.com", however this tip is getting known a bit more so some websites now sanitize your email and it won't work as intended... :(

Also, if for some reason you'll be using the email as the login it can be kinda crap.

Sorry for the long comment :) interesting topic.

I'm single and only hand my email out to companies I want information from

I live by the inbox zero philosophy. Every email in my inbox is a task that needs to be completed. When they come in, they get responded to if needed and then filed, archived, or deleted. So when a marketing email arrives to my inbox, I’m immediately unsubscribing so I won’t be spammed from that site again

This is the only way I’ve found to keep my inbox from having hundreds of unread messages piling up

2. I don't think marketing is a bad thing. As long as the companies provides an unsubscribe option i have no issue. I use Mozilla relay to filter out anything I don't want to touch.

3. I don't try optimize every minute of my day so I'll always have time to do pointless activities.

For my emails Gmail separates emails into the inbox for normal emails and the promo tab for promotional mail. I read promo emails after I check my normal emails. I unsub from things I'm never going to be interested so my promo inbox has humble bundle, pbtech and pizza hut deals. My 3 hobbies pizza PCs and gaming.

What is a "marketing email"?

I like to bw notified about sales on my steam wishlist for example. I'd say that is a marketing email.

I don’t get those but I find equally obnoxious landing page websites that seem to scroll to infinity with no price at the bottom.

Not quite emails, but its the same idea....

My mother will walk all around the house with her phone blaring some 30+ minute tiktok ad. She is fully aware that it is an ad, but something at the start promised an answer to .... something... and now she HAS to know what it is. She complains about having to wait so long to get to the end and calls everything in the middle nonsense, and the answer she always gets is "buy thing X" but.... she does it anyways. A lot. She isn't super interested in actually watching documentary since that requires paying attention, and with this she can just set it to the side while washing dishes or something.

We've given up on telling her that ads exist to sell things, she views them as "mini biased documentaries" which... I suppose is sorta accurate. But it still confuses the hell out of me.

I use single-purpose email addresses and so feel free to sign up for the mailing lists of things I’m specifically interested in. If I get an email from anyone else then that email address gets scrapped and I know I can’t trust that entity anymore.

If the emails I’m getting aren’t occasionally interesting to me, I unsub. But if an artist is making cool things and sharing them then those emails are worth reading. If a place I want to buy some stuff from is having a sale, that’s worth knowing (and if I might buy from there, I filter their emails so they aren’t in my inbox but are available and I can grab a coupon code from a recent email when I spontaneously decide to buy something). If new features are coming to a service I already use, then that kinda is “news” for me.

There are some I read, mostly from small local businesses I'm rooting for.

The really big corporate ones I don't know, though. I skip those too.

I can tell you from personal experience learning about email marketing that it's considered one of the most effective marketing tools out there, so yes it definitely works. It's a percentages game, though. You send out 100,000 emails and maybe you get 1-2% click through. That's still 1k-2k people who went to your website who wouldn't have without it, all with very minimal cost to the business.

1. A person
2. There are some companies who are way better at it than others. I’m not reading the 20th Uber promotion email this week, but when a furniture store I like puts out theirs once a month for new styles I will click on it and see what’s there. Especially for expensive furniture that maybe on sale or clearance.
3. Work a normal job. Doesn’t take long to click it, decide if I like something, or check the sale.

Gmail filters most of them for my personal email ProofPoint filters most of them for my work email. Any legit ones I get I tend to quickly hit the unsubscribe link for.

If you are getting an overwhelming amount of them in your inbox then you have poor SPAM filtering in place or subscribed to a lot of legitimate lists.

Since you mentioned Thunderbird, I assume you are on a very cheap ISP or self host mail system with poor filtering.