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Such services are likely breaking the law.

Edit: Downvote me all you want, they're still breaking the law… In the US there's the CAN-SPAM act (https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...) and nearly every other country has similar laws. Most of them require one-click unsubscribes to work.

It's still failure to comply even if it's due to negligence/ignorance/incompetence.



How exactly should I go about dealing with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment under the CAN-SPAM Act?

Individuals cannot sue under CAN-SPAM Act and I don't think any state Attorney General is going to bring a suit on my behalf because they didn't accommodate a plus alias.


Little of consequence most likely, but in the USA the route would be an fcc complaint I believe.

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

The technical details as to why they are failing to unsubscribe you does not matter at all. What matters is, you've unsubscribed repeatedly and they are failing to register your intent.


Send them a letter stating that they are spamming you and hope they will fix it?


What law requires companies to follow IETF standards?

'+' has no special meaning. The relevant standards only say that senders can't dictate how a system encodes its addresses. No law is in place to compel that behavior. If that were the case I'd love to force ISPs supposedly selling IP services to allow unencumbered use of port 25, residential servers, and transport protocols other than TCP and UDP.


They're not saying that not allowing a + is breaking the law, but unsubscribe links being broken (due to the presence of a + in the email) could be breaking the law, especially if there are no alternative methods to unsubscribe.


What does one-click unsubscribe have to do with accepting an email with a + in it?


The parent post to the one you're responding explicitly calls out that they cannot unsubscribe from lists when they've subscribed with a +-address:

> I have several services I will never be able to unsubscribe from because of the latter—and yes, I tried manually URI encoding it


You're allowed to subscribe with an address with the + sign, but the unsubscribe endpoint chokes on the + sign.




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