Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

> It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

I do that all the time. I consider every list I didn't explicitly and intentionally subscribe to as spam and treat them accordingly. I wish I wouldn't have to do that but I find subscribing someone to a list when they thought they were just buying or creating an account for a product so unnerving and disrespectful that I don't feel bad about it.

These are discussion lists that people intentionally subscribed to (which require double confirmation). I'm not that dense.

I get hundreds of different discussion list mails I have not signed up to.

If a button is hard to find or it doesn't directly unsubcribe me, I just report the email as spam.

I used to be naive and actually unsubscribe from things but it stopped working about 10 years ago so I haven't bothered since.

If the organization is legitimate, I find it usually works just fine. I usually only get such emails from organizations that I have recently started interacting with and that assume I want their newsletter. A simple unsubscribe fixes that. If I tagged it as spam, it would start to erode the ability of people who want this stuff to get it past the automated filters.