[nojs]

it’s generally a poor marketing strategy to ignore explicit requests for list removal, because users manually flag the emails as spam which is catastrophic to your domain rep and will tank deliverability. the incentives are heavily in favour of removing people who unsubscribe

[chuckadams]

The List-Unsubscribe header was pioneered by Dave Rolsky, one of the more notorious spammers of the early 2000's. His reasoning was that most people were just going to hit delete, but anyone who went out of their way to unsubscribe was a squeaky wheel that would cause more problems for him if they got angry about their request being ignored. So he really did honor unsubscribe requests ... at least until adding them to the next spam campaign on a different list.