> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.

The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.

Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the organizations doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for companies not to abuse your information, unless it's like 1-2 people and they're independently wealthy and the business is really more like a personal hobby.

I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.

They're not human. They really can't help it.

System Z is vaguely the read reply cards you would find in magazines. While I enjoyed the snail mail spammed materials, my parents were terrorized through the entire 90s by my abuse of those found in professional magazines like Computer Language.

You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it's already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.

> It's still not cool. Don't do it.

So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?

Word.

would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?

If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?

ah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noise