Yes, there is no way to limit the links put in an email by someone else.

It is a dumb stratergy though, as email filters are getting better all the time, so the recipient’s filter will catch on quickly.

To explain further, part of my duties at work as an IT technician is to investigate emails getting caught in the email filter or emails that are reported as bad.

The filter will analyze links, attachments, sender and the general contents of the email, and if it finds something bad, it will block it and inform IT.

We then use a fairly large toolset to investigate the email, we see a lot of metadata, in addition to the email itself.

We also see a quick summary of why the email was blocked, and can look through all incomming mail, even those delivered, to find more from the same campaign and then delete them.

So swapping an ubsubscribe link is no isdue at all for an attacker, but all links en emails are scanned, so if you do do that, it will be discovered very quickly.

As an addendum to my write up on my work with email scanning and the access we have at IT, I allway want to add some context, and I feel this is extra important in a privacy focused community:

This is only dealing with work emails, we do not have access to your external email.

We at my IT team are just interested in getting rid of bad emails from our system, while we have the access none of us are interested in gossip, we go in, investigate the issue, do what we have to to clean it up, and then leave.

That is what our coworkers/employer can trust us on, but as the saying goes, “trust and verify”, there are a lot of logs that log our actions that will show exactly what we did in the system and when.

Gossip and playing office politics is not interesting, they are directly opposed to our work, and I am lazy, I don’t have the time or energy to deal with that.