Unsolicited feedback

Those of us in the email space often have opinions about volume and frequency and opt-in and everything involved in email marketing. What we don’t always have is the luxury of receiving unsolicited feedback from recipients.
Every once in a while I find a post online that is that unsolicited feedback from someone. Today a poster on reddit describes his experience with signing petitions and the resulting mail from political causes. After signing a number of petitions, he started getting huge amounts of email. The volume was so high, he started unsubscribing.
I’m not going to copy his whole article here, but there are some interesting points relevant to the email marketing end of things.

1. He doesn’t know what he signed that triggered the mail.
2. His threshold for too many emails is “a half dozen or so a day.”
3. When given the option to decrease frequency, he took it instead of unsubscribing completely.
4. A don’t leave / win back campaign was described as “guilt tripping.”

Do I think he represents even a majority of subscribers or petition signers? Of course not. But this is a post that did not have to happen, had the petition maintainers informed him of the email he would receive before he signed the petitions. Offering him a chance to opt-down instead of opt-out would probably have kept him as a subscriber as well.