Way, way back in the day, the common advice was “never click on unsubscribe links. That just shows that there’s a live e-mail account there, and you’ll get tons more mail. Better to shoot yourself in the head than click those links.”
Well, I followed that procedure a long while back, and kept getting tons and tons of spam mails from places. And I can’t rely on spam filters, because my damn spam filters still occasionally stick a valuable client e-mail in the “Junk Mail” folder, so I end up deleting each mail manually.
OK…so starting late last year, I started to say “what the fuck”, and started clicking on the links to unsubscribe. And I have to say, in the vast majority of cases it appears to be a success. Not only do very, very few spams continue from the places where I click the links, but my total spam volume has decreased from close to 100-200 per day to about 1-5 per day. Now, it’s possible that at the same time other filters in the company were put into place that are screening better without my knowledge, but I’ve asked and been told that they haven’t changed really in 2+ years.
So how about it - opinion wise - is it still a no-no to click on the unsubscribe links? Would you only do it for established companies, and not porn ones? (I’ve been indiscriminately clicking on all of them).
The “never click on unsubscribed links” advice was usually for completely unsolicited emails from places you’ve never heard of. If you’re receiving email newsletters from a company you’ve done business from in the past, or otherwise is a legitimate company, there should be no problem with clicking on unsubscribe.
AFAIK, about 75% of the links I clicked on were from companies I had no relationship with. I just wonder if some of the spammers are getting…better? about that. I don’t know if there’s a factual answer, so I thought it was an IMHO. However, I posted it in the Pit…
I find, for a specific type of spammer, if I tell the vacation sweepstakes types that their offers to send me to the Caribbean are something I find threatening, I never, ever hear from them ever again.
I’ll second that suggestion. It’s sometimes hard to separate the legitimate from the scummy, but reputable businesses want to trim their email lists to those who truly want to receive stuff from them and scammers really don’t.