How do I remove myself from academic mailing lists?
Sadly, that sounds like spam, and you should treat it however you'd treat spam.
I'm not sure you should assume good faith on the part of the people sending you those e-mails. I'm an active academic with an e-mail address accessible on my university website, and I receive:
- Legitimate conference announcements over e-mail lists used by people in the area, which I could unsubscribe from if I wished.
- Announcements from people who actually know me.
- Unsolicited announcements from scam journals and conferences.
I receive several of the last category every week (and more, unsurprisingly, than any other category). I do not get legitimate mass e-mails that are not in the first two categories. It's possible that in other fields there are some legitimate announcements sent the way you describe, but I'd guess very few.
In other words: spam is spam, and you should feel no compunctions about treating it that way.
I also get these mails, and I have the impression there is no way to cancel these kinds of emails. Your email address is associated with an academic context, and available in public. This makes it fair game for all obscure conferences and journals who want to lure you in.
The solution I see is:
- Get a new mail address
- Try filter out any mails mentioning conferences and such. Gmail has facilities for this kind filtering based on keywords.
- Use a spam filter and let it train on filtering this kind of mails. Thunderbird and other mail programs, and probably gmail have these kinds of self learning spam filters. You just keep flagging it as spam until they are automatically removed from your inbox. Do check your spam box once in a while to catch errors.