At some point you receive a newsletter that looks quite legit, but you don’t recall subscribing to it. While looking at the content, you can’t figure out if it’s spam or not. What do you do with it? Delete! (And block the sender too, if you can).
How does a spammer benefit from this?
Your email address has a value, and here is an example of how it can be calculated. Let’s start with a score of 0. First, the email is accepted (of course, your email is valid). Your value is now +1. When you open the email (assuming you don’t have a security feature that blocks it), your computer connects to a website to retrieve an image and displays it in your Inbox view. As soon the connection request is made, the website collects information about you and validates that you opened the email: this means someone or something is actually looking at the Inbox, bringing the value to +2. There are other tricks that can add more value, but let’s skip to the interesting part for today. Being almost sure it’s legit, you decide to click on the [Unsubscribe] link at the bottom of the page. Bingo: you just raised your value to +5! Why? Not only did you open the email and maybe click a link, but you actually confirmed that a human being was looking at the Inbox and was confident enough to click the Unsubscribe link. You now have a very good chance of getting more spam very soon 
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