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TIFU by clicking "unsubscribe" in a junk email

Though it's always said that you should never click "unsubscribe", because that simply tells the spammer that it's a good email address, and I used to follow that guidance, over the years I've started sometimes clicking it on emails that make it past the spam filter, especially if they seem to come from at least a somewhat reputable source, as it seems like more and more companies are honoring these requests.

Unfortunately that was not the case today (well, yesterday actually). Received an email for "Life Line Health Screening", and stupidly, thinking that this was a reputable company, tried to unsubscribe.

Well, the floodgates have been opened. This particular mail account, which typically only receives a one or two messages a day, almost immediately started getting a much higher volume, almost 100 so far. Not just for the Life Line thing that I stupidly tried to unsubscribe from, but for window replacements, luxury bedsheets, portable heaters, seat cushions, etc. Judging by the timing, and the appearance of the emails (all are using the same obfuscation characters in the sender name and subject line to get some of them past the spam filtering), they are all coming from the same source.

So, apparently the Life Line emails were not being sent by them, they were being sent on their behalf by some third-party marketing firm, and upon their system seeing an active email address, they unleashed a torrent of junk mail from their other clients onto me. Most are being caught by the spam filter, but some are slipping through.

TL;DR: don't click unsubscribe on junk emails.

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