Comment by Nextgrid

Most subscription options at signup are using dark patterns to make you subscribe against your will (“untick this box if you want to miss out on the inconvenience of not receiving our latest deal”).

There’s also the issue of it being implemented badly (mostly by mistake rather than on purpose) where there are several spam systems & lists, the website opts you out of one but there’s another one in the background you can’t opt out of without at least receiving one and clicking the unsubscribe link - sometimes they make multiple campaigns so opting out of one doesn’t mean you’re safe from the next one, etc.

And finally there are those who aren’t technically marketing but a huge lack of respect for the person’s time & attention - customer service reviews and the “how did we do?” emails. Why can’t you put the feedback buttons in the existing emails instead of sending a new one and interrupting my flow & wasting my time?

For the latter I had a company doing this every single f’ing time for every ticket I opened about a benign bug or suggestion (using in-app chat still opens a ticket thanks to Zendesk Chat). I’ve eventually started forwarding them straight back into the main support email. I think they got the hint after several months - I’ve removed the forwarding rule and the feedback crap is nowhere to be seen. VICTORY!

Even if there are not technically marketing a lot of companies just have a complete lack of respect for their users time. Let’s take Facebook, Twitter or even Spotify for example; they have like over 20 categories of email notifications (excluding the newsletter) which are guaranteed to fill up your inbox by themselves, let alone having signed up to multiple of those services. You shouldn’t have to be manually unticking 20+ checkboxes just to enjoy a clean inbox.