Completely agree with you Shankar Ganesh! But permission is just one side of it in my opinion, the other side is what you briefly mentioned in one of the comments. Judicious use of email, we all tend to be judicious when it comes to our work email and completely not when it comes to our personal email. As Vishnu Prasad mentioned, I tried unroll.me for sometime but gave up because i treat my personal mailbox as a dumping ground of sorts and that’s true for most of us.

With rising number of apps, who as you correctly pointed out don’t even ask for permission before bombarding us with ads, I think we should see a change in user behaviour. I am much more cautious now of what I subscribe to now, which I wasn’t earlier and I would guess that is true for a lot of us. I would also hope the CAN-SPAM act is re-looked at or new legislation is created.