Every now and then I get an email from a supplier or a publisher - companies we do deal with and that we do give either our email addresses or some generic address.  The emails are often from a marketing company, sometimes from a subsidiary of the company.

The latest one was from Penton Direct, an offshoot of Penton publishing.  It claimed that I was a subscriber to some email service and was telling me that they were going to give my email address (actually, a generic one) to various 3rd parties and giving me an option to opt out.

These always piss me off because they're bullshit.  The email address was given out as part of a subscription and I ALWAYS say "no, don't tell me about other offers, only renewal notices."  But these companies apparently can't resist selling the names, so they send out these bogus messages that say "you signed up to receive information, so we want you to tell us if it's ok for us to sell your address to spammers."

So, as usual, I sent back a reply to the address that sent it, any other address in the message, postmaster@ , abuse@, privacy@ ...  I have about a 50% success rate with these - at getting a real person to reply and tell me they'll get my address off all their lists.

I sympathize. When that happens, I get them on the phone. Sometimes it's extremely challenging to find the phone number, but it's out there. (hint: whois) I keep calling until I find out who is responsible for selling my email address without my permission and then I pummel the bastard with obscenities and threats of lawsuits.

A short email is about all the time I want to take.  The threat of blocking their email "from our whole domain" makes me feel better, and in one case probably helped get a reply.

I own a domain and always give out emails that are unique to that person/organisation - typically their name. If I later get junk to that address I just add a redirect to the bit bucket.