To unsubscribe or to not unsubscribe...do companies pay any attention?

Do you keep a track of all the companies whose emails you've unsubscribed from?

I certainly tried...5 years ago...But nowadays you buy things from so many websites, sign up to so many email lists and get so much spam, that it becomes impossible to keep track of which emails are solicited and which aren’t.

Fast forward to today...

Just before 2pm, I received an email from Moonpig telling me about their new Valentine’s Day offers...

Didn’t think anything of it, deleted it, carried on with my day.

4 hours later I received another email from Moonpig, apologising for sending me the earlier one:

The question is, had I unsubscribed? I don’t think I had!  I buy cards from Moonpig periodically and so I kind of expected to receive emails from them.  

I only realised it was a mistake when they told me they had made a mistake, and I still don’t think it was a mistake anyway!

So what do you do when you’ve realise you may have sent emails out to people you shouldn’t have...send an email to the same dataset apologising just in case? Or actually work out who shouldn’t have received the email and apologise to them instead.

Considering Moonpig’s business is purely online, this is something Moonpig should be experts at.  Handling personal data, managing CRM databases, sending useful emails etc etc...this should be their bread and butter.

But now, my impression is that they have now made a mistake...when they might not have done.

What would have been the right thing to do?