Every once in a while I’ll get porn spam and I was wondering if replying to it to unsubscribe is a mistake. I’ve read that you shouldn’t reply at all, but at the bottom of the email it said
It is this line:
that makes me think it’s ok to unsubscribe.
I’m not being flooded with spam, and I have no problems with porn. It’s just a minor annoyance, that’s all.
And what is that string of letters at the end for?
Respond and nearly guaranteed you will get more spam than ever. They hope you will unsubscribe so they can tell that a real live sucker read their email and responded.
You may be interested in the Staff Report Should I “hit reply to be deleted from this mailing list”? I have never heard of the “Information Exchange Promotion and Privacy Protection Act”
Yeah, that’s what I thought. The spam isn’t a problem; I only get about one email a month. I was just wondering.
Thanks for the info.
Just a little more information: when you hit “unsubscribe,” you verify that this is a valid e-mail address. It is then added to the list of valid e-mail addresses, which can be sold for more money than likely e-mail addresses. So even if they never send you anything again, someone else will.
Also, you may see an email make a reference to S. 1618 / H.R. 3888 as part of its “disclaimer” making it okay for them to send you spam. Just be aware that this bill died in 1998 and never became law. They just like to say they sent you an email “in accordance” with it.
Spam sucks.
(unless you grill it up on a bun with a little mayo and lettuce. MmMMm, Spamburgers)
To me, spam in burgers sounds almost worse that the email kind! 
Most people will already know this trick, but for the record it is a really good idea to create a free email account with Hotmail, Yahoo or some other free service. This way you can give out this legitimate address when required (when subscribing to webpages etc) but don’t have to risk getting hundreds of spam mails sent to your proper email account. You can always delete the Hotmail account and open a new one at any time, but you can’t usually do this with your proper ISP account! After all, the best way to beat the spammers is to ensure they do not find out your address! You’d be surprised at how many seemingly decent companies sell your details when you subscribe.
One word of caution… it’s best to give important people like your bank your proper address if they have a clear and decent privacy policy. After all, you don’t want to miss important emails when they go to an address you deleted the year before!
I’ve got my own domain- and I’ve started doing this little trick:
If a company asks me for my email address, I give them (the company name, written backwards)@(insert domain name here). For example, if Spamco wants my email address (and if I have to verify the address by replying to it, for whatever reason), I give them “ocmaps@lightnin’.net”.
Since all email sent to any unassigned address at lightnin’.net will go to the administrator (yours truly), I get the “verify this” email. I make sure that I reply to it using the same email address, of course. Then I set up a mail rule to automatically delete all email sent to “ocmaps@lightin’.net”.
This way I can find out just who Spamco sells my email address to- and if, for example, they promised to not sell my address to anyone, I can easily call 'em on it. Since the email gets deleted automatically, it doesn’t clog my inbox- as a matter of fact, I never even have to look at it.
Just my little way of having fun. 
Cool idea. What has happened when you’ve notified them? Was it in violation of a posted privacy policy?
The string of letters at the end is an attempt to prevent spam-catching scripts from detecting a set of messages that are essentially the same, but which each have a different string tagged on to them. Of course, any spam-catcher worth its salt has safeguards to still catch them, but spammers try to sneak by, anyways.
Dunno. Hasn’t happened… yet. But I’m ready!
I’m actually looking forward to it…
I’m sure that anyone sleazy enough to sell your name in violation of their own privacy policy would deny anything you accuse them of, however well supported.
One a month? You lucky bastard. I get, at the very least, 10 a day. I do not need penile enlargement- I have no penis. I do not need to watch nubile women undress- I have a mirror and I go to the Y. And don’t even get me started on the things my grandmother doesn’t need to see (I clean her account out- hundreds of spam emails- every week)
(hijack)
Does anyone know WHO is sending all this spam out (yes yes, I realize it isn’t all from one guy)? Who do these companies pay to push their products (and are there any stats on who is getting suckered into buying them?)? Where can I find them? And teach me how to make a bom… ;)(I probably shouldn’t write that)
Cat Fight - I think a majority of spam on the Internet comes from a few extremely prolific “Spamhauses” (Spamhäuser?!) though of course there are plenty of sleazy fly-by-night operations too.
Look here if you’re really curious.
The real way to deal with spammers is
(a) never buy anything from them
(b) report them to their ISP and whoever hosts the spamvertised site.