They know your inbox has 100s of competing senders and their message could get lost, that's why they spam. A large number of people don't curate their inbox, never unsubscribe and just make do reading 20% of their messages.
Same with phone notifications.
The funny thing is I just moved all my email over to Fairmail and did several other things to try and "degoogle" my life. The funny thing was as soon as I got Fairmail installed, I finally realized how much spam was hitting even my gmail inboxes, but since gmail and outlook both filter them into separate folders, I never saw them. Fairmail has the ability to do the same, but it was really good for me to go through and unsubscribe and block the rest.
Now I barely get any spam from any of my accounts so life is a lot easier now. Another example of how these companies make it easy to not do anything and just have it out of sight.
I won't buy, ever again, from someone who doesn't respect the unsub request.
This HN thread reads like a fun Chesterton's fence exercise.
New engineer shows up the first week on the job: "10 emails? You guys are all stupid this only needs to be 3 emails...receipt, shipped, and feedback!"
Whole team groans, having to explain yet again the many years of scar tissue behind exactly why every one of the 10 emails exists.
I am getting furious when I read advice like "you should spend time to talk to your customers".
It feels like people giving such advice never really did anything in actual marketing/sales. Mostly because single company uses dozen if not more applications, no one gives a flying fuck about your application and if they would spend time giving feedback to each app they use, they won't have time to their job.
Yes you can get customer time - but it is not "just talk to the customers", if you get one having a day or 2 hours or 1 hour you take it or you might never hear from them again or hear from them again in 2 years or maybe 6 months. CUSTOMER TIME IS SOMETHING SUPER SPECIAL not something "maybe you should do that".
So for developers out there — your sales guy just had a chat with a customer he has another meeting with him in 2 weeks - it is not like he is making up deadline, he needs to show something, anything moving forward to keep the customer hooked and maybe have another meeting with the guy and if has nothing to show it might be back in years or never...
Of course I myself am using shitload of apps and services in my work and I don't give a fuck what they do and don't want them to bother me if I have a subscription, unless they break something then I am going to write an angry e-mail to them (I do understand they might have a problem, as mentioned I am working on B2B SaaS myself) but angry mail works better (maybe not for latest Anthropic Opus).