A number of years ago I signed up for a Paypal account. I’m not sure why I did this, since in most cases Paypal can be used as a card merchant without specifically having a web account with them. Anyway, I recently started receiving monthly marketing messages from Paypal, somewhat disguised as identity fraud emails:

Subject: (name), your monthly activity reminder

Dear (name),

Hello from PayPal. Just to let you know you can log into your PayPal account anytime to see your recent transactions.

Primary email address
(email)

Statement Date
02 April 2013

[sidebar] You don’t have a way to pay on your account [link]

[sidebar] Earn credit card rewards [link]

Where customers register their card numbers and bank accounts with Paypal, there is probably value in this, but since I do neither, this is just unwelcome inbox noise. Unfortunately, there is no unsubscribe feature within the HTML email as one would expect, nor anything obvious on their website. Since I’m keen to decrease the amount of time I spend on email admin, I’ve unsubscribed by deleting my account:

My Account -> Profile -> My account settings -> Account type -> Close account

If you’re a Paypal user just by virtue of paying by card at sites that run Paypal, closing an account won’t prevent you from paying this way in the future. However, with a bit of luck, it might reduce the amount of advertising hitting your inbox!

Others have noticed this too, and on a related note, this post points that Paypal’s use of multiple domains for email assets makes it harder to spot phishing attempts.