I don't want to 'unsubscribe' telling spammers my email is valid for resell. I want to BLOCK spammers when I mark them as spammers, no matter if it is baby jesus reincarnated or if I personally subscribed to that list at the beginning unsuspecting an abusive spammer behind that mailing list.
I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender.
Not to stand up for spammers, but this initiative looks like it is designed to work with "the good guys"; organisations that use services like Mailchimp and have unsubscribe mechanisms that work and so on.
It won't really help with people who just send stuff over and over to a home-made list that is kept in an Excel spreadsheet and never clean the undeliverables or unsubscribes out of it.
And it certainly wont help with the pills and stocks brigade.
If enough users press "unsubscribe" to a sender, and that sender doesn't stop sending them emails, this is a high quality signal that the sender needs to be blocked altogether.
If GMail's response to this kind of signal is aggressive enough, it also gives an incentive for legitimate-ish senders to offer one-click unsubscribe links, to decrease the number of cases where someone presses 'unsubscribe' but then doesn't jump through some second hoop.
So yeah, I'd say this has some advantages for dealing with a wide range of scum.
The most frequent 'spam' mail that slips through the filter are conference mails (really).
I have been to conferences in computational linguistics and machine learning. It is clear that some conferences are giving or selling e-mail addresses to other conferences. I don't really mind getting e-mails from related conferences, it seems that over time there has been much topic drift as my e-mail address has been handed from conference organiser to conference organiser.
Unfortunately, since the conferences are all organised by separate entities, it is not possible to unsubscribe anymore. And unfortunately, this was before I started using '+' extensions to create custom addresses.
From my experience working with the commercial (for-profit) conference sector, I've never seen any organiser hand over a list of email addies to anyone. They are jealously guarded as a core asset of the business.
They do quite often (heck, all the time, in fact) do "swaps", where they will mail another org's piece to their own list in return for the same. These emails will usually seek to get you to give up your contact details in return for something (a whitepaper, an interview transcript, even the conference brochure), thus adding you to the new org's list as well.
But the key point is you should always be able to unsubscribe from the first org and hear no more from them or their "marketing partners".
I think most would see it as unprofessional, bad business and cavalier with regard to privacy to actually give lists of email addresses to other organisations.
Of course, there are also some very big conference organisers out there, and they may well be pushing all sorts of unrelated events through their in-house lists. Once again, a simple unsubscribe should do the trick.
As somebody who has been tagging addresses for many years, I can say unequivocally that at least some conferences a) give email addresses up to conference sponsors, or b) are terrible at security and/or vendor selection, and so lose control of their mailing lists.
Maybe these are the sorts of things that other conference organizers cluck their tongues at when they're having drinks at conference conferences. But from the attendee side, it's difficult to distinguish which might be which.
I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender.
Block means block, not unsubscribe.