Bonjour. Merci!

This is a really good idea - thank you.

Ned - whenever I've taken a look at the evidence for whether unsubscribing is bad (because it confirms your email), it turns out not to be true - because very few spammers rely on confirmed emails and lots of people do respect unsubscribe requests.

One thing to bear in mind is that email addresses get added to lists for all sorts of reasons - such as typos that result in Person B being added to a list rather than Person A with a very similar address, someone taking publicly advertised email addresses and thinking it's ok to add them to their list, and so on. In plenty of these cases receiving an unsubscribe request is then honoured (at least both in my experience and the research studies I've seen).

Two possible explanations (or rather explanations that have applied to me in the past):

a. Random chance causes the occasional clustering - a burst of unwanted emails doesn't necessarily mean there is an underlying cause

b. You've just been added to a database somewhere, such as one of those which lists contact details for journalists, bloggers etc. I work in PR myself, so you won't be surprised to know that I think those databases can be very useful, but there is a real risk that some people misuse them and go for blanket emails.

What's surprising to me isn't that Labour's split on the issue (it's often been a matter of debate in the past) but that they are displaying their split so openly and so close to polling day.