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Not sure if you meant political campaign emails specifically or marketing campaign emails in general. The former are some of the absolute worst offenders in that regard, for sure.

I try to use unsubscribe links when 1) they exist and 2) the email is from a legit organization that I reasonably believe is actually going to unsubscribe me from something (if not from every place they've copied my address to by now), but I can see the argument for just flagging as spam in the case where an organization oversteps previously agreed bounds. Especially with the political campaign emails, the unsubscribe game can feel like futile whack-a-mole.

For ordinary commercial campaigns, I'd worry that flagging as spam would cause legit transactional mail (i.e. mail that belongs in the Updates auto-label) from the same organization to get flagged as well, but based on the state of my Spam folder, that's already happening anyway...



I share your concerns, but marking spam as spam is the only way to incentivise good behaviour.


If the email is from an organization I have interacted with and it offers unsubscribe, I will use that the first time. If they don’t stop, then they get the spam tag.

If an unsolicited email contains no unsubscribe, that is bad behavior and they get spam tagged immediately.




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