Ask HN: Did you start receiving more commercial emails after moving to the US?

3 points by danielenick89 ↗ HN
I am very careful with my email inbox, and try to unsubscribe regularly to commercial emails I get from various service I sign up to. From my understanding, lately in Europe it was forbidden to make commercial email notification opt-in the default, but still there are some services which find creative ways to send you unwanted emails and I always take the steps needed to unsubscribe when I see messages like that landing in my inbox. So three weeks ago my inbox was fine and clean with just the emails I want to receive.

Then I moved to the US, and all of a sudden, starting maybe a week ago (so ~two weeks after moving), I've started receiving a lot of new different commercial emails and general notifications from various services. That's happened with a lot of different services, from social media, online shops I've used maybe once, to that time I left my email while registering my purchase in a french music shop in Paris. My wife who moved with me is also experiencing the same thing.

So I have some questions: first of all, are those services behaving differently depending on your location? are these services assuming I opt-in to options that are maybe forbidden by Europe by default, but not in the US? And what if I am just in a vacation? But foremost, How do they know I'm in the US? Remember the music shop in Paris, or some services I've not visited for a while?

While I do have some ideas on how this sorcery may work, if you know something more feel free to comment.

Did some of you also experienced something like this?

2 comments

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A different perspective: you moved to the USA close to the holiday season. Promotion emails and notifications might be soaring following the natural seasonality of marketing campaigns.
https://imgur.com/a/JO2MePU

As you can see in this case (one of many) the last email I received was an acknowledgment of unsubscription. Then I didn't receive anything until today. Also last year there was no christmas email like this during this time of the year.