I didn’t have any experience quite as glaringly frustrating as you, but I did notice a few things.

First, several times when I clicked on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I was taken to a page to “manage” my subscription where staying subscribed was the default radio button. It would have been easy, if I wasn’t paying attention, to simply click the submit button without noticing this. Totally bogus. And, particularly, since in many cases these lists are part of legitimate Web information sources. Do they really think they’re going to build brand loyalty with shenanigans like that?

I also discovered two days after my purge that several of my unsubscribe attempts didn’t even work. Lo and behold, some of the lists are continuing to send me what now I can only call spam.