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