I get my fair share of unsolicited emails daily. A lot of times, they have a link or email address to unsubscribe to whatever list they think you are a part of. I usually don’t do this, mainly because I figure that may just be a ploy to determine if my email account is active or not. Is this a good strategy, or should I be taking a more active approach to reduse spam, instead of my passive approach.
By the way, I do usually unsubscribe myself from emails where I know how they got my name. For example, CDNow was sending me emails, but it was because I had registered with them, and probably asked to be on their list. If I get spam email that I think I actaully asked for (either unintentionally or intentionally), I will respond to it with “unsubscribe” or whatever.
Do not reply to any mass-mailing that you did not specifically request. In many cases, the spammer is either simply sending mail to a lot of random addresses in the hopes that some will be valid, or has bought a list of “validated email addresses” that was compiled through some nefarious means. If you send a reply, you’re telling the person who sent mail that your address is “live” - that is, someone is using and viewing it. You can expect more mail from the original spammer or another of their addresses.
If you reply to a spammer whose main purpose is culling a list of email addresses to sell to gullible spammers, you can expect to be contacted by every person who they sell their list to.
Reputable services (like most moderated mailing lists) will ask you to “opt in” - you won’t ever hear from them unless you provide them an email address, and the first email you get from them will essentially just ask for confirmation that you actually want to receive further mailings. These sort of setups have nothing to gain by allowing you to unsubscribe (or “opt out”) from future mailings, since you already freely provided them with a working address. Using the unsubscribe option for these is fine and dandy. However, anyone who sends you an unsolicited mailing, and implies that the only way to avoid future mailings is to opt out by mailing them back, is scum, pure and simple. Ignoring them is the only way to minimize their effect.
I don’t reply to those “just tell us if you don’t want to hear from us anymore” options on the grounds that there’s no sense in telling them, “hey, here’s somebody who’s actually reading this junk.” I’d much rather leave them guessing.
I use Lycos Mail normally, and it’s got a feature where you can tell it not to accept e-mail from certain addresses. It helps cut down on a lot of the repeat offenders.
It depends on the nature of the email. If it looks like the header is forged then it will probably not help, after all they are already being deceitful so it is probably too much to expect them to honor your request. The link is put in there to make the mail look legit.
There is a school of thought that says you should never respond to spam because now they will know that your email is a legitimate address. I don’t really buy that because the whole point of spam is that it is cheap enough not to worry about if it is a real address or not. But on the other hand I never respond to the emails because I don’t really think it will help. If you seem to be getting stuff from the same company over and over you might try it. After all your are getting the junk anyway. A lot of the spam I get is seems to be just sort of one off things. I haven’t yet received another offer of a degree from that same respected non accredited university.
I think you’re right on the mark… your best bet is to delete them. Don’t give them the satisfaction of knowing there’s a live body at that address.
One thing you might be able to do, depending on your email program, is set up a rule or filter that catches some of the more obvious spam emails and automatically deletes them.
If there is a particular company that grows overly tiresome, you can also check with your ISP to see if there is any way to block their addresses altogether.
Fixed your title. And you know what? I’m pretty sure we have a Straight Dope staff report coming up shortly on this very topic! So watch the home page…
Jill
I made the mistake of responding to the “unsubscribe” e-mail address on a spamming once…
Let me tell ya, there’s no better guaranteed way to get all the spam you’ll ever want, need, or dread than by doing that. Best just to ignore and delete.
It’s probably not a good idea to respond to the sender or the “opt-out” address of an unsolicited e-mail.
If you’re sick of getting stuff and want to do something about it, there’s a few things you can do :
Send it as a complaint to the abuse department of your ISP (check your ISP’s policy), or the mailer’s ISP. In the mailer’s case, the domain name is most likely forged, so you may not be able to rightly locate the original source.
However, some of the domains whose names were forged may be willing to fight it anyways since they don’t like it that people think they sponsor these spammers. On the other hand, some of them (and I won’t say who) simply don’t care.
If you’re willing to spend the time to figure out the true sender’s ISP yourself (and this is almost always possible for the recipient to do), you can learn & find tools by looking at abuse.net, and also www.samspade.org. Of course, you may find that the original sender’s ISP is only too happy to provide the spammer a home, and do not intend any policy against unsolicited e-mail filling up your inbox.
If you’re interested in the political action being taken, see the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (www.cauce.org)
Here’s a recent article from the LA Times about someone who responded to all his spam for a week : Seven Days of Spam
One last note – whatever you do, please don’t attack and/or spam the spammer.
I view it slightly differently. Even if a spam is the most tempting email ever, I will not respond. I will not give my business to a company who uses such a blatantly rude technique to solicit customers. There are plenty of legitimate non-spamming businesses out there who offer the exact same services and do not resort to spam. I would much rather give them my business. This holds true with most unsolicited phone calls and junk mail as well.
The spammers will add your name to their “live” list and sell it if they get any indication that it exists. Some will spam a bunch of random email names and make a note of those that don’t get an “unable to deliver” message.
Some spam ISPs even set up complaint e-mail. If you complain, you get on their list for more.
I’m using Nestscape Communicator. I tried setting up a filter, but I need to know something: Can you put more than one string in the filter? I open Edit and click on Filters. When I’m setting up the filter it says “match any of the following” [sender] “of the message” [contains] [string]. I cut’n’pasted the addresses of the spammers into a doc, then tried to paste them into the [string] box. Only the first address appeared. The filter parameter I typed above can be repeated four times. So can I only filter five addresses? Or can I put “yahoo.com”,“4bigcash.com”, etc. on a single line?
It looks as if the sender name is often a randomly-generated string of letters and numerals, so I’m thinking the only reasonable option is to list the names of the hosts that look spam-prone.
A common spammer trick is to stick the spammees’ addresses into the BCC field. You can catch this type of spam by setting up a filter that catches all emails that don’t contain your address in the To: or CC: fields. This won’t stop spam that’s coming directly to you (such as email newsletters and such that have your address in the To field) but it can cut down on the flow.
With Netscape Communicator, you’d choose Edit… Message Filters… New. In the Filter Action area, choose “To or CC” from the first pop-up menu and “does not contain” from the second. Then enter your email address in the field on the right. Finally, choose an action for the filter. You can either delete these messages automatically or move them to a special “Spam” folder. (I’d recommend the latter, as you may lose some legitimate mail if you delete it outright.)
This was written specifically for NN 4+ and Mo/Fizzilla for Win and Mac, but pretty much any email program worth its salt has filters like these. Good luck.
I forward spam to my ISP’s (RCN’s) anti-spam e-mail address.
It would be a good idea to see if your ISP has such an address. The idea is to use reports from their customers to see which ISPs allow spamming from their service. I think when they get enough spam from a single ISP they block all mail from the ISP. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
Hmmm. I guess it depends on the ISP. I recently left a large national (U.S.) ISP, and I can all-but guarantee they’d never block all incoming traffic from another ISP (though, see below). Why? Because a large chunk of spam is sent from users of the large ISPs or via freeware email services like Hotmail. If an ISP decided to block ALL incoming email from, say, yahoo.com or aol.com, their subscribers would be at the door with pitchforks and burning torches in minutes.
Even in cases where it’s possible to identify specific companies’ domains as being spam sources, ISPs have run into trouble. A couple of spamhauses were threatening to sue ISPs that blocked email from the spammers’ domains. I believe the scumbags, er, spammers claimed that the ISPs would have to prove that every one of their members didn’t want to receive spam. Don’t know what happened with these suits, though…
But back to your point. Reporting spam to your ISP is only really useful if the spammer is using the same ISP as you. Since most ISPs now have anti-spam policies, they’ll usually boot the spammer. (Though a couple large providers have been caught using “pink contracts,” which let spammers get away with their crap as long as complaints don’t go over a certain level. Evil.)
Based on what I’ve seen, most providers don’t really do much with out-of-network spam complaints. If your ISP has a good network security team, they may log the complaint and pass along the info to the spammers’ ISPs, but there’s no guarantee that those folks will do anything with the info. (Each ISP is different, of course, and I’m sure some do a bang-up job.)
In the long run, you’ll probably be more likely to get a spammer booted using tools like SpamCop http://spamcop.net/. SpamCop reads through the headers and lets you send spam complaints to the appropriate network security people.
Oh, and remember many megabytes ago when I said that most ISPs won’t totally block other ISPs? Well, that’s not totally true. If an ISP turns a blind eye to spammers or if they leave their mail servers open for anyone (including you-know-who) to use, they may get added to MAPS’ Realtime Blackhole List http://mail-abuse.org/ and/or the ORBS list http://www.orbs.org/whatisthis.html. All MAPS/ORBS participants block incoming email from any server on this list. The only way to get off the list is to take action to stem the flow of spam from your servers. It’s not a perfect solution (I’m not crazy about it myself), but it seems to get results.
Whew! What got into me? Anyway, hope this was helpful/interesting/not a complete waste of rods ‘n’ cones.
Hmmm. I guess it depends on the ISP. I recently left a large national (U.S.) ISP, and I can all-but guarantee they’d never block all incoming traffic from another ISP (though, see below). Why? Because a large chunk of spam is sent from users of the large ISPs or via freeware email services like Hotmail. If an ISP decided to block ALL incoming email from, say, yahoo.com or aol.com, their subscribers would be at the door with pitchforks and burning torches in minutes.
Even in cases where it’s possible to identify specific companies’ domains as being spam sources, ISPs have run into trouble. A couple of spamhauses were threatening to sue ISPs that blocked email from the spammers’ domains. I believe the scumbags, er, spammers claimed that the ISPs would have to prove that every one of their members didn’t want to receive spam. Don’t know what happened with these suits, though…
But back to your point. Reporting spam to your ISP is only really useful if the spammer is using the same ISP as you. Since most ISPs now have anti-spam policies, they’ll usually boot the spammer. (Though a couple large providers have been caught using “pink contracts,” which let spammers get away with their crap as long as complaints don’t go over a certain level. Evil.)
Based on what I’ve seen, most providers don’t really do much with out-of-network spam complaints. If your ISP has a good network security team, they may log the complaint and pass along the info to the spammers’ ISPs, but there’s no guarantee that those folks will do anything with the info. (Each ISP is different, of course, and I’m sure some do a bang-up job.)
In the long run, you’ll probably be more likely to get a spammer booted using tools like SpamCop http://spamcop.net/. SpamCop reads through the headers and lets you send spam complaints to the appropriate network security people.
Oh, and remember many megabytes ago when I said that most ISPs won’t totally block other ISPs? Well, that’s not totally true. If an ISP turns a blind eye to spammers or if they leave their mail servers open for anyone (including you-know-who) to use, they may get added to MAPS’ Realtime Blackhole List http://mail-abuse.org/ and/or the ORBS list http://www.orbs.org/whatisthis.html. All MAPS/ORBS participants block incoming email from any server on this list. The only way to get off the list is to take action to stem the flow of spam from your servers. It’s not a perfect solution (I’m not crazy about it myself), but it seems to get results.
Whew! What got into me? Anyway, hope this was helpful/interesting/not a complete waste of rods ‘n’ cones.
The best thing you can do if you get spam is to track down the spammers and attempt to have them removed from the internet. This not only helps you keep your inbox clean, but makes for a better internet for everyone. Plus it is eminently satisfying when you get a reply from a spammers ISP saying that they are terminated, or visit their spammed website and find out it is 404.
I started tracking down spammers in 1995, and still report almost every single spam I get.
Also news.admin.net-abuse.email has some helpful participants.
FWIW, RCN is reknowned far and wide the least spam-tolerant ISP thanks to a fella known as afterburner.
And never, ever reply to a spam. Ever. It has been experimentally verified that the spammers sell each other “live” addresses composed of remove requests.
