I assume there are people who read these things, otherwise companies wouldn't send me so many of them. I seem to get daily spam from literally any company I've ever interacted with in any way, and they are long boys full of text and pictures that Thunderbird helpfully hides from me but I presume are full of jagged brightly coloured stars saying "DEAL DEAL DEAL" or whatever.
Mostly I click delete on these emails faster than the email client can even load them, but every so often I peruse a few sentences of the trade specific items that give a headline that promises actually interesting information… but its always just more marketing guff disguised as a news story.
It's obviously making someone money to spam the world constantly, so I assume someone is reading these things and acting on them.
- Who are you?
- Why are you interacting with the spam and making it viable for companies to keep sending it?
- What do you do that you have so much free time you can allocate some of it to consuming it?
When registering for stuff I always pay very close attention to not check the "send me offers and promotions" checkbox, unless I am genuinely interested.
If any gets by, or if any by default signs you up, whenever I get an email from them I'll go to the bottom of the email and unsubscribe.
This means that all the marketing emails are from things that I genuinely have interest on. Sometimes, even these things get too spammy and unsubscribe from those that kinda act abusive. They aren't your "FREE LIMITED IPHONES! OPEN NOW!" kind of emails. Those I mark as spam, hoping to improve the detection system on whatever email client, and move on.
So, essentially, I have "free time" to read those as much as you and I have "free time" to come here on lemmy. It's something I am interested on.
Edit: just realised I didn't specifically answer your questions but it's basically:
Edit2: I think there's a distinction to make here between SPAM emails and Newsletters. SPAM emails are mostly sent based on leaked emails lists or something. Newsletters, you usually sign up for them (knowingly or not).
Edit3: Bonus ProTip - If you use Gmail you can get a + sign after your email and before the @ symbol and whatever your write on there is ignored. So for instance myemail+otherwords@gmail.com will still forward to myemail@gmail.com . This means you can kind of find out who leaked your email if you register as "email+websitename@gmail.com", however this tip is getting known a bit more so some websites now sanitize your email and it won't work as intended… :(
Also, if for some reason you'll be using the email as the login it can be kinda crap.
Sorry for the long comment :) interesting topic.
For anyone that already has an iCloud subscription, “Hide my email” does essentially the same thing and can’t be sanitized as it’s an actual separate alias that Apple creates for you. If you end up getting to much spam in a certain alias you can delete it and migrate the account to a brand new alias
Well to add to that then, Microsoft outlook also has a free alias service, which work as a redirect email that you can enable/disable at will. But I believe there's a limit to those, so I just use my Gmail address most times.