alt Hacker News> Everybody just assumes they're the only thing hitting your inbox
They know your inbox has 100s of competing senders and their message could get lost, that's why they spam. A large number of people don't curate their inbox, never unsubscribe and just make do reading 20% of their messages.
Same with phone notifications.
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without email spam, there wasn't any reason to curate a mailbox.
Don’t unsubscribe - that’s a signal of a live email address. Add a rule filing their domain straight to trash.
This, plus the fact if they don't overcommunicate and send you 10 transactional emails (eg. "your order is still on its way!") they'll have people filing credit card disputes and BBB complaints, blasting support screaming this-site-is-a-scam-where-is-my-order!?? over a two day shipping delay.
This HN thread reads like a fun Chesterton's fence exercise.
New engineer shows up the first week on the job: "10 emails? You guys are all stupid this only needs to be 3 emails...receipt, shipped, and feedback!"
Whole team groans, having to explain yet again the many years of scar tissue behind exactly why every one of the 10 emails exists.
Texting is the new email. I have about a half dozen or more email addresses and very few of them get used nowadays.
The funny thing is I just moved all my email over to Fairmail and did several other things to try and "degoogle" my life. The funny thing was as soon as I got Fairmail installed, I finally realized how much spam was hitting even my gmail inboxes, but since gmail and outlook both filter them into separate folders, I never saw them. Fairmail has the ability to do the same, but it was really good for me to go through and unsubscribe and block the rest.
Now I barely get any spam from any of my accounts so life is a lot easier now. Another example of how these companies make it easy to not do anything and just have it out of sight.