Sure… but that is always true when it comes to law. I just don't see how that makes the situation worse for the people?

I don't want to be tracked by marketing emails without consent (or, more realistically, ever, because please). If you want to do it anyway, from here on out you have to violate the law.

If you had no trouble with doing that before (being a filthy spammer/scammer), you still won't. If you do, then you will stop tracking me. Hooray.

Not having marketing spammers is still better than having spammers and scammers

There's usually an unsubscribe button for marketing spam, and if there isn't I usually block their email. You can't do that with scammers / illegal spam.

Fuck the unsubscribe button. I never subscribed in the first place.

It’s one disgusting thing when people hide signup behind email confirmation without clearly marked opt-in spam confirmation. It’s another when I get home from a professional event and I have a dozen new “subscriptions” and people “just reaching out” or “following up on our prior conversation” to a single-purpose email address I gave to one place and used a fake name and fake company name.

Email marketing can get fucked.

Marketers, spammers and scammers are the same thing - sources of unsolicited e-mail, engaging with whom is not good for you. Eliminating marketers from the trio means only that much less messages to worry about.

I guess I must not be important enough or something because I don't recall the last time I got any marketing emails without sharing my email with a marketing person. The only marketing outside of "Rewards" programs that I get is marketing from the one conference I go to every year, and I get plenty of free swag from them, then I unsubscribe.

Did you take a look at your Spam folder? On my primary address (one I used for almost two decades), 90% of my spam is unsolicited marketing communication. Quickly skimming it, roughly half of that 90% is from parties I may have interacted with in the past, the other half is from apparently legit companies that I haven't interacted with, that pulled my address from somewhere (possibly because I used it to register my business).

Outside of spam, I spent some time and unsubscribed from most of the pseudo-solicited communications I got (i.e. the kind of pre-GDPR bullshit where I register for some service and this automatically counts as consent to receive marketing communication). About solicited marketing messages I don't whine much (except that they exist), that's on me.

(I actually used this occasion to softly threaten one of the marketers from the top of my box with legal action, because they are clearly breaking Polish law - they tried the "this message is only request for consent to sent the actual message" trick, but executed it badly.)

Have you ever clicked one of those? I've never been sure if that wouldn't have worsened the situation by giving feedback that this is an active mail address managed by somebody.

If it's from a legitimate company in American jurisdiction they are legally obligated to stop sending emails if you click unsubscribe. I suppose that piece of information has some nonzero value that you are giving up in exchange to not be contacted by that company.

If you filter just a single address that address can change. If you filter their domain you might lose legitimate correspondence.

I’ve had several groupings of unsolicited marketing emails over the years where I’ve clicked Unsubscribe and ended up on what’s very clearly a Totally Not That Email List, Honest...but it’s advertising the same things, in the same way, just from a slightly different email and possibly different company name. They have all been American in origin.

You can complain under the CAN-SPAM Act.

It's so asymmetrical though. The amount of effort it takes to spam someone is vastly lower than a complaint.

What would be great is a third-party site where you can somehow document/log unsubscribe requests. Then, if the company still spams you, document that. A few hundred users is pretty good proof, and the company can't just argue a glitch. It'd pay for that.

Easy enough to fix: use a unique address for a company, unsubscribe, then take the related company to court later. Works even better in a GDPR location.

Right; with my unlimited resources, time, and understanding of the legal system.

I mean, I'd love to be able to, but do you think I'd even be able to determine what the company's actual address is?

I click it all the time when I feel I'm getting way too many emails. If I feel like it's not some malware spam at least but genuine marketing trying to sell me something. Every now and then I go back to all those "rewards programs" emails and unsubscribe to the least relevant ones to me.

It's not like legitimat-ish email marketing will suddenly switch to scammers or illegal spam, they would actually get in trouble for violations. Companies that don't rely on scams aren't desperate enough to risk getting fined for such a weak lead (I'd hope).

Not that I'll ever configure my email client to automatically download images, as far as I'm concerned downloaded images is just making your email address more valuable to the spammer by confirming you got it.

So GDPR would solve some of the problems? That sounds great to me. It can also cut some borderline grey data companies.

True, but the "law abiding" corporations are the problem for my privacy, not spammers.

You're right, but this law isn't targeted at scams and malware. It's meant to stop broader commercial tracking, and leaves us better off on that front, while criminals were going to do what they do anyway so we're no worse off there.

Actually it does, because if industry stops using tracking pixels, it demotivates email clients from having to support it, and makes it easier to block bad actors. Same with tracking on websites and browser support. Chrome would instantly put in a tracking blocker if Google couldn't do tracking any more. But so far Google's strategy is fighting and working around the law because they think they would lose a huge amount of revenue without tracking.

> it demotivates email clients from having to support it.

Hardly. It's just the abuse of being able to display images in HTML-formatted mail. You would have to remove every tag and attribute that is able to request an external URL from a mail HTML dialect to counteract tracking.

Laws don't stop criminals from being criminals (except when they do of course), but it isolates them so they can't easily blend into the crowd of non-abusive individuals.

Plus, if something is illegal there's less likely to be an industry driving down the price of that activity. If something is more expensive and less convenient, then people (including criminals) are less likely to do it.

Have the floor? How does this change the behaviour of scammers in the slightest?

> but now scammers and malware spammers have the floor instead.

That's a non-sequitur and complete nonsense unless you want to suggest that GDPR automatically turns marketers into criminals.

Also, just because it can't solve all of the problems at once doesn't mean it's a bad thing.