First of all, having to go through weird contortions like creating a new email address, just to stop receiving certain emails, is pretty ridiculous. It's not that I dislike the announcements themselves, I just don't want them in my inbox. Just like I disabled email notifications on Facebook, and go to the site when I want to see the notifications. I don't want everything under the sun in my inbox, especially things that in my situation are sensitive content. I don't see how that is unreasonable. Yes, I can make a filter, and probably will, but it's still more hassle than I want to go through. As you obviously can't force members to receive the notifications, why not just let those who don't want them simply unsubscribe? That has been the universal practice on all other sites I've ever used, and to not provide that option is, in my honest opinion, just plain spammy.
Secondly, my question still stands: why do the announcements include instructions for unsubscribing, when that option is not actually provided? Just to make people feel like they can and hope nobody will actually want to??
Now, I understand I'm not the admin and am not in a position to demand anything. But this issue really does bother me.