Unsub-Scribed

The Death of the Emails That Wouldn’t Let Go

May 23, 2025

Last September, I was looking for some new outdoor furniture as part of a little garden renovation we’re planning for this year. I made the mistake of looking at some sun loungers on the Groupon website, although to be fair, I didn’t realise it was a mistake at the time.

They were nice enough, and the price was OK, but ultimately, I decided that they weren’t right for what we wanted. However, Groupon disagreed.

They fully believed they were perfect for me and nothing could convince them otherwise.

While I didn’t get as far as adding them to my basket and checking out, just checking them out for a few seconds was enough for Groupon. They were ABSOLUTELY positive I wanted them, nay, NEEDED them in my life. Their emails ‘reminding me’ I hadn’t bought them became incessant!

It’s not just me, I’m sure we’ve all been there.

You’re minding your own business, scrolling through the internet at 2 am like a normal, well-adjusted adult, when suddenly - BOOM - you accidentally glance at a product for 0.3 seconds.

Maybe it was garden chairs. Maybe it was a neon pink dog sweater. Maybe it was a ‘smart’ spatula that texts you when your pancakes are done. Whatever it was, you didn’t buy it. But oh, the internet noticed.

And now, like a scorned lover who can’t take a hint, it will haunt you with emails about that stupid spatula (or garden loungers) until the end of time. This is their story.

Side Note - It’s only recently that I realised that Groupon is a play on the word ‘coupon’. Not sure what that says about me.

Dearly beloved,

Ladies and gentlemen, email-openers, compulsive online window-shoppers and digital ghosts of restraint past, we are gathered here today not to praise Caesar, nor bury him, but to lay to rest a more persistent force than time, tide, or the queue at Greggs on a Friday lunchtime.

Gather ‘round, dear mourners, as we bid farewell to a relentless, unyielding force in our lives; the ceaseless barrage of marketing emails from companies desperate to sell us that one thing we glanced at for 3.7 seconds in a moment of weakness.

Gone, but never forgotten… mostly because they won’t let us forget.

You didn’t buy them.

You barely lingered.

You were one second away from checking the weather, one tab away from Googling “do owls have knees”, and yet… you clicked. You clicked just wanting a little more information.

But that was enough.

That click was all it needed for the algorithms that rule our lives. It was love at first website.

You had become intrinsically and electronically linked forever.

Today, we honour these digital ghosts of consumerism past, the phantom reminders of fleeting desires, the algorithmic stalkers who just couldn’t take "maybe later" for an answer.

Let us pour one out for the emails that never gave up, even when we did.

The Accidental Summoning

It started so innocently.

A lazy scroll on your lunch break. A friend’s birthday is looming. A vague thought of “I deserve something autumnal and rugged that says I read books and understand moss.”

You searched: “tan leather shoes UK size 8”.

Then… “chunky sole but make it existential”.

Search results were presented. You clicked on a link. You browsed a page.

You may have - may have - hovered briefly over the “Add to Cart” button like a medieval monk afraid of accidentally summoning the devil with a poorly formed Latin noun.

But you didn’t. It wasn’t for you, so you closed the tab.

You thought it was over.

It was not.

That one click activated the dark summoning ritual known in corporate circles as “retargeting.”

The Inbox Invasion Begins

You probably forgot about it, but then first came the light touches; friendly, curious, like an ex who suddenly starts liking your Instagram posts from 2017.

“Still thinking it over?”
“You left something behind!”
“We noticed you looking…”

Then, the tone shifted, as all unhealthy relationships do, from playful to clingy to emotionally manipulative.

“Gary, we saved your size. But we can’t hold on forever.”
“Time is running out…”
“We’re worried about you. It’s been three days.”

Soon, your inbox subject lines read like a soap opera:

“FINAL HOURS!”
“ONE PAIR LEFT. JUST ONE.”
“We’re CLOSING the stable door, Gary, and the shoes are BOLTING.”

Weird that you never gave them your name. You gave them your email. But that was enough because you once clicked “Accept Cookies” and, just like that, capitalism knew your soul.

In Loving Memory of "Hey, We Noticed You Left Something in Your Cart (And We Will Never Let It Go)"

Remember the emails? Oh, those sweet, persistent emails.

They were there for you when no one else was, constantly. Like a lovesick admirer who misread politeness for passion, they whispered into your inbox with the subtlety of a foghorn:

"Still thinking about it?"
"Your cart is getting lonely!"
"LAST CHANCE (just kidding, we’ll send 12 more ‘final’ reminders)"

They’re the digital equivalent of a department store employee lunging at you with a sample aftershave, hissing, "YOU WANT THIS. YOU NEED THIS. YOUR LIFE IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT THESE OVERPRICED TAN LEATHER SHOES."

And yet, despite their aggressive courtship, you remained unmoved.

Not because you didn’t want the shoes - OK, fine, you didn’t - but because their insistence made you question everything.

Why did you look at these shoes?
Who are you, if not a person who impulse-buys footwear at 2 am?
What dark sorcery compelled you to click "View Details" in the first place?

Alas, these are the existential crises you left in your wake.

The Science of Desperation: How Marketing Teams Weaponised Our Curiosity

Let us not pretend these emails were born of genuine concern. No, they were crafted in the shadowy labs of corporate marketing departments, where behavioural psychologists and algorithms conspire in darkness to exploit our fleeting attention spans in three increasingly annoying steps.

The Three Stages of Email Harassment

The Friendly Nudge
- "Hey there! Just wanted to remind you about that thing you totally wanted!"
  - Innocent. Almost charming. Like a waiter refilling your water without asking.
The Guilt Trip
- "Your cart is feeling abandoned…"
  - Now we’re anthropomorphising shopping carts. Next, they’ll tell you your abandoned socks are crying in the tumble-dryer.
The False Ultimatum
- "LAST CHANCE! Only 3 left at this price!"
  - Lies. All lies. There will always be another "last chance". The sale will never end. The wheel of consumerism keeps turning.

Let’s be honest, this is not marketing - it’s emotional blackmail. And yet, it works. Because buried deep in our lizard brains is the fear that if we don’t act now, we’ll miss out forever.

The Psychological Warfare of "Personalised" Recommendations”

Let us not forget what makes all this possible: a thing called data-driven psychological manipulation, or, as marketers prefer to call it, “personalised customer journeys”.

Here’s how it works:

You express vague interest in an item.
The machine tracks you.
The machine concludes you are emotionally unstable enough to break within 7–11 digital nudges.
You receive emails, reminders, banners, “OnlyFans of Footwear” content until you finally crack and hit “BUY NOW”, if nothing else to stop your email inbox filling up with nonsense.

The science behind it is deeply dystopian and weirdly flattering.

Somewhere, someone with an MBA and a dry-wipe marker is standing in front of a graph that predicts your next move better than your therapist, and all because you looked.

Just looked!

They make you believe it’s personal. It’s not, because nothing says "we care about you as an individual" like an algorithm frantically guessing your desires based on a single click.

The devil, it seems, really is in the retail.

Meet the Team Behind Your Madness

As infuriating as they are, let us pause and acknowledge the hard-working staff in the back-end of your retail breakdown.

There’s the CRM Strategist, who believes all humans can be divided into four types: impulsive buyer, discount chaser, stubborn mule and that one guy who uses incognito mode like it’s a religion.

The Email Copywriter, who took a Creative Writing degree and now writes emotionally manipulative subject lines like “We miss you, Gary” and “You deserve better shoes.”

Then there’s the Retargeting Intern, who gave up smoking and now copes by designing banners that scream “JUST 1 LEFT!” even though the inventory hasn’t changed since January.

And, of course, who could forget the power behind the throne, the Algorithm, which loves you more than anyone ever has. It’s the algorithm that whispers in the ears of all your apps. Who knows you clicked on the shoes and that you also once googled “is Substack toxic?”

Somewhere, a marketer is high-fiving a data scientist because their AI correctly identified that yes, you do, in fact, suffer from the human condition.

The Dark Art of the "Limited-Time" Scam

This nefarious cabal also utilises the oldest trick in the book, artificial scarcity.

"Only 2 left in stock!"
"Selling fast!"
"Offer expires in 1 hour!"

These phrases are designed to trigger our primal fear of missing out (aka FOMO). But let’s be honest - if the product actually sold out that fast, the company would be thrilled, not desperately emailing us about it for weeks.

The truth?

That “limited-time offer” will be back next month under a different name. The "last chance" is never the last, oh, and that "exclusive deal" is about as exclusive as a coupon clipped from a breakfast cereal box in the 1980s.

The Sneaky Little Snitches: How Cookies Betray Us All

Ah, yes - cookies; those seemingly harmless little digital biscuits. Not the warm, chocolatey kind that you devour in a moment of weakness, but the digital kind that lurk in your browser like tiny, crumb-sized spies.

It’s these cookies that marketers use to follow you around the web like a needy Victorian orphan.

These devious little snippets of code are the exact reason companies know you looked at that inflatable unicorn pool float at 3 am and will now haunt you with ads for it until the heat death of the universe.

You blindly clicked "Accept All" because the pop-up was in the way and you just wanted to look at shoes, not sign a contract with the Surveillance Goblin.

But now?

Now you’re being tracked with the intensity of a wildlife documentary. [Adopts Our Best David Attenborough Voice] “Here we see the Common Internet User attempting to resist targeted advertising… oh! She clicked again. The cookies have her now.”

You didn’t just accept cookies. You invited a marketing séance into your laptop.

Think of cookies as the nosy neighbour who peeks through your blinds, takes notes on your weird late-night shopping habits and then sells that information to the highest bidder… and then the next highest, then the next.

"Oh, you glanced at a yoga mat for 0.2 seconds? Here’s 400 emails about ‘wellness journeys’ you never asked for!"

They’re like the police, but instead of tracking criminals, they’re tracking how many times you hesitated before closing the tab on those £500 noise-cancelling headphones.

And the worst part? They pretend to be helpful.

"We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience!" they chirp, like a cheerful kidnapper explaining why the duct tape is really for your own good.

No, Karen from Marketing, you’re not "enhancing" anything - you’re digitally stalking me so your company can carpet-bomb my inbox with "friendly reminders" about things I never wanted in the first place.

So here’s to you, cookies - you tiny, traitorous crumbs of capitalism. May you one day crumble into oblivion. But let’s be honest, you’ll probably outlive us all unless we regularly clear our internet cache.

A 21st Century Haunting

Let’s not forget that this operation wasn’t a one-channel pursuit. Oh no.

Those shoes you half-wanted follow you from site to site like a Victorian ghost child with unfinished business.

You opened The Guardian and there they were, next to an article about sea level rise, looking aggressively waterproof.

You opened YouTube to watch a recipe for lasagna. The pre-roll ad? Shoes!

You opened your banking app. You didn’t even know they could advertise there. Yet… the shoes.

One day, you went outside and a man with a clipboard tried to hand you a leaflet - you flinched. You’d seen that shade of tan brown before. The PTSD was real.

A Dramatic Goodbye… That Isn’t One

Gradually, the emails shift tone again, from seductive to mournful.

“We guess this is goodbye.”
“We’re sorry we couldn’t make it work.”
“This is the last email we’ll send. Probably.”

Then, silence.

For three days, you think it's over.

You feel lighter. More free.

You start reading physical books. You go outside. You subscribe to my Substack. You remember your mum’s birthday without being prompted by a calendar notification.

And just when you begin to heal…

They return.

Subject line: “Gary, we lied.”
20% off. Dark tan now in stock.

Bollocks.

When Capitalism Knows You Better Than You Do

These emails do more than sell tan leather shoes, or yoga mats, or inflatable unicorn floats. They sell insecurity. Urgency. Identity.

They tell you you’re incomplete without this item. That this thing - this leather-souled, laced, steel-capped monument to marketing science - will fix your life.

That you’re a person who wears shoes like this.

You’re stylish, confident and competent. You definitely know how to make lentils taste good and keep your houseplants alive (or not).

Except you’re not. You’re someone who opens 11 emails from a shoe company and then shops somewhere else out of spite.

But that’s the genius. The emails never judge you.

They whisper, “We’ll be here when you’re ready, Gary. We understand you. Come home”.

The Moment of Silence (When the Emails Finally Stop)

Eventually… it happens. The emails cease. For real this time.

The reminders vanish. The algorithmic gods finally release you from their grip.

At first, it’s disorienting.

Did I… buy it? Did they give up on me? Am I no longer worthy of their spam?

But then comes clarity.

You realise you didn’t actually need that ergonomic avocado slicer. Your life is not incomplete without a "smart" toothbrush that texts you about your gum health. You are more than just a data point in a corporation’s conversion funnel.

In that rare, sacred silence, you glimpse the truth.

You were fine before the emails. You’ll be fine after.

Breaking Free: The Radical Act of Ignoring Ads

What if we stopped letting brands dictate our desires? What if we reclaimed our inboxes (and our brains) from the constant hum of buy, buy, buy and instead opted for bye, bye, bye!

I think there are three steps to this digital liberation.

Unsubscribe Like You Mean It - That tiny "unsubscribe" link at the bottom? Click it. Be free.
Embrace the Power of "Nope” - Next time you see "Your cart misses you!" whisper back, "I don’t even remember you."
Remember: They Need You More Than You Need Them - Companies don’t send 17 follow-up emails because you need the product. They do it because they need your money.

Rising Above the Noise

And yet, in this cacophony of capitalism, a whisper remains.

A whisper that says, “You don’t have to buy the shoes.”

You can clear your cookies.

You can hit unsubscribe.

You can - brace yourself - turn off notifications, and when you do, something strange happens.

You begin to see the world differently.

You realise how often you’re told you’re not enough unless you purchase a thing.

How often urgency is manufactured. How often you’re being nudged, nudged, nudged like a sheep toward the checkout button.

And maybe, just maybe, you find a new kind of freedom.

Final Farewell, You Beautiful, Annoying Nuisances

In a world of aggressive sales tactics, hyper-personalised ads, and 42 identical emails that all begin “Oops! You forgot something!”, it’s easy to feel small.

But you’re not small.

You’re not a statistic. You’re not a data point. You’re not “Cart Abandoner Segment B.”

You’re a whole, complex human being who simply opened a browser tab while bored at work.

And maybe that’s enough.

So let us now close this eulogy with the quiet dignity of someone who resisted a relentless marketing campaign, saved £120, and still has perfectly functional, if slightly tatty leather tan shoes.

But if you do buy them in three months when they’re 40% off and you’re having a bad day - that’s fine, too.

We’ll say nothing… except: “Welcome back, Gary.”

Until then, we mourn the loss of digital peace.

We mourn the illusion of choice. We mourn the death of “just browsing” because, in the eyes of e-commerce, just browsing is not a neutral act. It is an invitation. A contract. A blood oath sealed with cookies and pixels.

So here’s to you, relentless marketing emails.

You were persistent. You were shameless. You made us question our life choices every time we saw the subject line "Your cart is sad without you :("

You were the mosquito buzzing in our ear at 3 am, the telemarketer of the digital age, the ghost of consumerism past whispering, "Remember that thing you didn’t buy? It remembers you."

But most of all, you reminded us that in the grand circus of capitalism, we are both the audience and the clowns.

Rest in spam… or, more likely, rest never - because I’m sure there’s already another email on the way.

"Hey, we noticed you read this blog post… wanna buy a eulogy?"

Amen. (Sigh. Unsubscribe.)

Thanks for taking the time to read my post. I do appreciate it. Have you experienced these incessant emails? Do they ever convince you to buy orjust drive you to unsubscribe? Let me know in the comments below. I read and reply to them all!

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