Unsubscribe Links - Do They Work? Do Yours?

Warning....borderline rant ahead....

I'm on a few mailing lists that, for me, deliver little value. In an effort to reduce the amount of clutter in my inbox, I've been unsubscribing from a number of different lists.

Lately though, I've seen a number of emails still coming through from senders from whom I have repeatedly 'successfully unsubscribed' several times. A number of these have received personal email requests from me. I've also looked up the email addresses of some of the employees at these firms and contacted them ...with no apparent results or effect.

Thing is, these aren't only the small shops like the 'Content Facilitator'. Some of these are medium size like 'Retail Online Integration' magazine, Target Marketing & Publishing, and some really large outfits like Chrysler / Dodge.

One of the ways I've been fighting back is simply to click the button on my browser that says 'Report as Spam'. The immediate results are nil, but what this does do is identify to the major email monitoring (blacklisting) services about who continues to send out spam. They in turn, report to the major email services such as aol, hotmail, etc so that email from these senders begins to get filtered out and eventually, never delivered, or blacklisted altogether.

In the end, I'm curious as to how you fight back against unsubscribe buttons that don't work. Who are the biggest offenders that you've come across?

Tom