I got frustrated with the amount of daily spam in my Gmail "Promotions" tab -- especially since it made searching for email basically impossible. While there are services that will help me unsubscribe from all the mailing lists I'm signed up to, they wanted unfettered access to my Google account, which I wasn't going to give.
I wrote a open source tool called hatchet which will access your Gmail account using IMAP, find the latest unsubscribe link for each unique email sender, and write it all to a csv/spreadsheet file.
Is there any reason hatchet is described as a tool for Gmail, when it lets the user specify any IMAP server? Are other email service providers officially supported by hatchet?
My gmail is just my last name, only six letters long, and I get maybe one or two spam emails a month, if that.
Then I'm aggressive about clicking unsubscribe when the unwanted emails show up. It's been very effective, I basically get no spam other than the pure junk that my provider (Fastmail) filters for me, and for which GMail would do the same.
When I see other people's inboxes full of crap I don't understand why they don't just click unsubscribe and be done with it?
Goes without saying, don't blindly click unsubscribe, and only click it for big mail delivery services like mailchimp (you can see it in the URL). Otherwise, don't bother and mark the email as spam.
99% of legitimate spam is from business you've bought from/interacted with, or who have sold your email to others, and those unsubscribe links all do work quite effectively.
Then I have a bookmarklet to show me all emails without the "Sub" label.
Works wonderfully.
Until your boss mails you „emergency, our pubsub is getting too much load, we need to unsubscribe from the logging queues asap“ or something ;-)
1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email...
I didn't want Gmail sending my full name to spammers, so I set my "display name" to just my email address. Thus when I send mail it's as: emailaddress <emailaddress> instead of MyRealName <emailaddress>.
However: when I flag something as spam, and Gmail (un)helpfully asks "Do you want to Unsubscribe & Mark as Spam?", when I say "yes unsubscribe", then -- somehow -- it sends that "Unsubscribe" email using my REAL NAME and not the display-name that is used for normal outbound mail. So in the end the behaviour is precisely backwards from what I would want.
My conclusion is to never ever use their "Unsusbcribe & mark as spam" anti-feature, instead I have to just mark anything I don't want as spam. Sigh.
I am getting a LOT of spam lately that annoyingly has false Unsubscribe links being used to collect data. The world is an evil place, and Gmail is not very helpful at blocking that.
