I'm sure it's a corporate thing, and no human hands were involved. I got one of those today.

I never thought it there were human hands but did wonder at the financial stability of the companies do it.

Any email from a legit business will have an "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Click on that, do whatever else is sometimes required, and that should end emails from that source.

" but did wonder at the financial stability of the companies do it. "

I'm not sure why. Many businesses hire marketing companies to handle sales campaign material sent to people on their contact lists, whether by email or regular mail. The cost (especially of email) is insignificant because all the handling is done by software. Every company has advertising and marketing campaigns, it's typical of any business and indicates nothing at all about financial stability.

Recently I've been getting an unreasonable amount of snail mail and emails from a very busy and successful car dealership I've been to for service. I suspect it's to reduce their 2019 inventory as the new year models come out. I unsubscribed on the email and sent back one of the hard pieces, asking them to take me off the list. It all stopped.

Unless you worked in sales or marketing it is unlikely that a person will understand about "mining" old files when business is slow. "Mining" files that are over ten years old is normally not done.

Maybe it wasn't done before, but all it takes now is a mass-distributed algorithm to many companies who will just plug it in. I think its just a new move in business.

Are you talking about yourself? You're not talking about me if that was intended. I worked in the private sector, not for the government and was involved and am very familiar (at a high level) with sales and marketing campaigns.

Businesses that accumulate contact information for retail customers retain such info. If an IT-driven marketing service is hired, they'll send out the program materials to any and all names on the list. This is much more focused than mass mailings or general media advertising because these are prior customers. No screening of dates or nature of customer relationship is typically done because a wide net is intended to be cast.

You suggested earlier that doing so casts some shadow on the fortunes of the business, that too is not a valid assumption.

If you have been using the Google browser, it allows web sites that you visit to place tracking cookies in your computer and this may be a source of extra adds. I have been using DuckDuckGo as a browser because it does not allow tracking cookies, however, some other cookies are allowed. DuckDuckGo is almost as good as Google; Google may offer a wider scope of searches.

Isn't Duck Duck Go a search site, rather than a browser?

I unsubscribe to almost everything. I have a few companies that I don't mind getting emails from. There are a couple (one just this morning) that I bought one item from last Christmas and I get 2 or 3 emails a day from them. I unsubscribed from them this morning.

Elmer - yes. It is only a search engine....as is Google (Google Chrome is the browser feature).

It is really only the browser that will encourage or deter random ads from appearing according to its own privacy settings. Or aftermarket software like ad blocker. I use Google almost exclusively as a search engine and get virtually no ads appearing because my browser blocks them all. I get plenty of random emails, most from places or sites I have never heard of and never accessed, but my junk mail filter eliminates most of them.

I normally receive all kinds of random emails but I found this one interesting since the last interaction was over ten years ago. Being a person who is actually curious I posted on here to see if others have started receiving ads from companies that they used to do business with years ago. Has nothing to do with browsers or blocking only curiosity.

I've suddenly started getting a slew (as in, a dozen or so) of spam marketing emails daily. All ostensibly from legit businesses, such as AIG, Renewal by Anderson, and so forth -- I haven't and will not open any to see if they really are. Fortunately Outlook is very good at identifying them as spam and they are deleted daily.