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unsubscribing to SPAM

2K views 22 replies 10 participants last post by  csonni 
#1 ·
For a long time now I always thought that unsubscribing to SPAM emails would increase the flow of SPAM since this would be verifying my email address. Well, since I've been receiving upwards of 80 SPAM emails a day, I decided to try clicking the Unsubscribe links at the bottom of most of them. Some required me to enter my address, others didn't. In the last couple of days, I've noticed that the amount coming in has dropped significantly, even though I was told that it will take 10 days to 2 weeks to complete my request. Anyone else have any experience with unsubscribing to such emails? I'm sure someone will chime in here telling me I shouldn't have done that. Anyone?
 
#2 ·
I went on an unsubscribe campaign some time ago. I was up to about 120 emails in the morning of which 115 were spam. It would continue through the day. I am down to almost nothing.

What I find really interesting, my malicious (read Nigerian scammer et al) spam, for which there never will be an unsubcribe button, has also dropped off dramatically with this.

Every couple of weeks or so, it will get a small flock of spam land on my desktop. As I start unsubscribing, I find that I am always going to the same unsubscribe page. So someone else has received my address on a list and has to be "Educated".
 
#3 ·
There's a difference between random spam, which you can't unsubscribe from (or subscribe to, really) and direct marketing from reputable companies.

All of the companies offering legitimate mass emailing services have unsubscribe options, and they honor them. The random spam messages, sent out by scammers/phishers etc, are impossible to unsubscribe from because the senders just don't care.
 
#6 ·
There's a difference between random spam, which you can't unsubscribe from (or subscribe to, really) and direct marketing from reputable companies.
I wonder if that explains why people talk about receiving dozends and more SPAM messages a day and I don't get any.
If I subscribe to email notifications and then receive them, I don't call tha SPAM - ever.

SPAM to me are unsolicited emails (which John calls 'random' spam).
Any direct marketing messages that I requested or signed up for is not SPAM - at least in my books.
 
#4 ·
At 80 a day what do you possibly have to use.

FWIW I have a Yahoo box that gets an average of 3 a day and manages to divert 99% of them to the SPAM folder. Only recall having to fish one real email out if the SPAM box in the past two years.

OTH Yahoo has shown zero interest in reducing the flow of SPAM.

I do wonder if some of those Nigerian letter scams are something else. A terrorist encodes his message in one of those sends it out to half a million people and the intended recipient. Ends up with a gadzillion other messages in the bad guys SPAM folder. The Homeland Nazis miss it thinking it is SPAM. The bad guy gets the message whilst the Homeland Nazis tap your phone calls home to Mom.beejacon
 
#5 ·
OTOH it is sometimes a total waste of time. There is a nutbar food conspiracy theorist who is sending to every email address I have, unsubscribe requests are totally ignored.

An issue with unsubscribes is that many of them are automated, and if your sending email account doesn't equal the account that is in their database, the request is ignored. I have many more incoming accounts for various purposes than I have outgoing.
 
G
#8 ·
And all too often those ISP spam filters are waaaaay overzealous and you can end up losing legit emails to them. Being a forum/site admin I see this happen all the time. The biggest problem is that they don't label things as spam and let your mail app deal with it (most mail apps will heed this spam label and put things into your spam folder). Instead they just end up blindly deleting the email with no trace at all.

For those people that have had issues with this you'll know what I mean ... it can end up meaning that you can't reset passwords or sign up for certain sites, important emails that people send you about info you need to know and never get, etc.

Another thing that some IPS's implement which is horrible is a "box trapper" type setup, which forces people sending you an email to reply back to a canned email it sends them before it will let any emails go through. This is a horrible approach because it's not always a person at the other end. Enabling something like this basically means that you won't be able to sign up for anything online, you won't be able to reset passwords, get email notifications for anything, nadda. I don't know how many times people absolutely freak out because they can't sign up or log in to a forum or site that I support and after it all comes down it's because they have enabled something like this on their account and no automated emails get through ever.

As sad as it is, the safest way (meaning if you care about getting the important emails) of dealing with spam is to let your local mail client deal with them. Server side solutions might seem convenient but there's a lot of potential for lost information inherent with them.
 
G
#12 ·
Sounds like Shaw is at least doing an ok job with their spam filters server side, I can't say the same for everyone. Cogeco comes to mind most recently, but also some big hosting setups can get over the top crazy sometimes as well (*cough* hotmail *cough*).

Dealing with their technical people was a special kind of hell. Many weeks of phone calls and emails to get a completely 100% valid opt-in mailing list whitelisted (which apparently is very often required now if you run a decent sized mailing list). By default they greylist or blacklist any mailing list if any user reports it as spam or if you get a high enough score on any one mail sent to the list to mark you as spam. Depending on the nature of the mailing list this can be quite challenging, a few 'suspicious' words and you're zapped!

If you don't contact them and get whitelisted specifically then there's a good chance that the email users never get your email. It was no simple task getting whitelisted, even though the site has run for 10+ years and follows every rule they laid out for bulk email, they kept telling us "just subscribe to this $189/yr service we offer that validates your list" but after getting it escalated a few times and spending 30 minute conversations with several people they finally relented. :(

email is not really a valid means of communication critical or time sensitive data anymore, not that it was ever great to start with, but every year it's more and more common for messages to just never arrive with no notification on either end of things.
 
#14 ·
Sounds like Shaw is at least doing an ok job with their spam filters server side, I can't say the same for everyone. ... ...

email is not really a valid means of communication critical or time sensitive data anymore, not that it was ever great to start with, but every year it's more and more common for messages to just never arrive with no notification on either end of things.

Thanks for your comments and your last one sure hit home!!!

Both my Mac using cousin, myself and a friend discovered recently that we were not getting ALL our email messages, and Apple's Mail.app seemed to be the main problem.

They were available in my Eudora 6.2.4 and a demo of Postbox and when using and checking with webmail and/or another email client application my friend was using. And getting all our accounts working reliably again took various methods to do so and was a real PITA to get things resolved properly. Or at least seem to be - for now.

Considering that email turns 40 this year according to a blog, and with some other interesting comments, things should just work better!!!!

"E-mail as we know it turns 40 this year. While we may have not recognized it in its youth, e-mail started out with a single, not-very-inspiring message between hosts on ARPAnet. Until that e-mail, written and sent by a programmer named Ray Tomlinson, it had been possible to send messages to terminals on the same computer but never between computers on different network hosts.

The message, the contents of which Tomlinson has forgotten, made it ten feet across a room from one computer to another and the communication medium was born. Offers for discount Viagra quickly followed."
Postbox Blog

Yup, and then more spam followed...

But how many email users actually check by using webmail or some other email application and do a comparison to see if they are actually getting ALL their email messages??? Or if the receiver is actually getting the email you sent them?? Hmmm...

I sure don't have any other alternatives to suggest, but maybe someone else does.
 
#13 ·
The advice you originally received is correct: never ever respond in any way. Trash the messages, without opening them. Always.

Your email address has likely been sold as part of sets of millions of addresses 1000s of times over and over. Every time you reply you show it as valid and part of a new set.

Change your address. It's never going to get better, it will only seem better for a short time.
 
#15 ·
Try getting a Gmail account. Set it up so that it picks up email from your current account. The spam filters in Gmail are really good, and the spam emails end up in the SPAM mailbox, where they can be reviewed, and messages sent there can be tagged as not being spam when necessary. Works really well for me. I have set it up as an IMAP account.

Kostas
 
#17 ·
The Mail.app was not 'deleting' any messages, and in my cousin's case, no messages were getting downloaded from her POP account and for myself and friend, just some messages were never received and were not hiding anywhere.

Actually it was a bit unnerving, but everything seems to be working as expected now for all three of us Mail users.
 
#22 ·
I usually email mail them back from one of my "deep sixable hotmail accounts" to unsubscribe,
But even then, I'll usually just ignore the account and open another one, If it gets too bad.

I never use any of my good accounts to unsubscribe.

I always use a disposable mail account just in case when I'm not sure if they are going to spam me.
 
#23 ·
Just as an update- I think maybe the unsubscribing helped with those emails, but there's a vicious supply of new ones coming. I'm getting around 60 a day. I am not about to try unsubscribing to all those. Unfortunately, once in a while, there will be a semi-important email that gets into the Spam folder.
 
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