> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.
While I generally agree with your opinion, the case is that bad actors are using the unsubscribe link to identify real email addresses. The vast majority of people do not match what I imagine might be the average HN tech-savvy audience.
They get an email they don't want and click on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of it. What they don't know is that they have been added to a database of "live" emails to be sold and reused for all sorts of purposes from that point forward.
In other words, as is the case for many laws, they keep honest people honest. You do not control criminals with laws until the result of the law is that they end-up in prison (or whatever the appropriate punishment might be).
I ran an experiment during the last presidential election (US). I used two separate throw-away emails to subscribe to updates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I used these emails directly on the main organization pages. I also setup filters to sort all incoming emails into two separate folders.
A year later I deleted both email accounts and the tens of thousands of messages on both folders. It was an interesting game of whack-a-mole. Clicking on "unsubscribe" had no real effect. Both parties passed this email to, it seemed, everyone except for the local school janitor. It was nothing less than insane. There was no effective way to make it stop. I unsubscribed from both main organizations. That did nothing at all.
My conclusion was that, while "Unsubscribe" sounds good and looks useful, it only works with non-criminal organizations (sorry, I consider political parties to be at the threshold of being criminal organizations). It's like a lock on a door, or, to use a more provocative example, a gun. The laws surrounding these things only get respect from honest law-abiding people. A criminal will gladly take a crowbar to your door-lock and break into your home, or use a gun to do the same or worse.
Going back to unsolicited emails (and by extension SMS), not sure how we fix this in real terms. It's a really difficult problem.