06-25-2004, 04:00 PM
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5000+ Posts? I Should OWN This Site!
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 5,133
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Spam Egg Spam Spam Bacon And Spam
Do you hate spam? Sure! We all do! In fact, we've made a few posts on the subject. But do you UNSUBSCRIBE from it? There are two schools of thought on this.- 1. While some spammers may use it as a verification that your address is "good" and send you more spam, most will remove you from their list, and therefore, your overall spam will be reduced.
2. Most spammers are not honest, or they wouldn't be advertising underage porn and warez. Therefore, any unsubscribe attempt will only increase the amount of spam.
Personally, for my most spam-infested email account, I unsubscribe when I have time. I think it's reduced the amount of spam I get, but perhaps an account needs to reach a certain threshold before it helps. Though, I have to say, I don't bother for warez spam. And why is it that mortgage spam is among the worst for not having unsubscribe links?
Anyway - I can kind of understand some spam tricking the unwary into clicking and such, and therefore perpetuating the spam. But there are certain types of spam I just don't understand at all. I'm not trusting tons of money to a mortgage broker that has to use obvious tricks to get through my spam filter. If I can't trust them to have valid unsubscribe links that actually unsubscribe, why would I trust them with my financial future? I also hate it when the unsubscribe link redirects to a CNN news page on netscape.com. That gets me really mad!
Even more bizarre - are you going to buy l33t medicine? V14gr4 or Z4n4x or something? Who are the people buying from these spam emails? Frankly, if they can't spell it properly, I wouldn't feel safe taking it. Plus, I'm not sure I would want people to see a bottle on my counter labeled Z010ft. "No... This is a BETTER drug than "Zoloft". It's much more 133t."
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06-25-2004, 04:04 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 434
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I personally never unsubscribe due to the email confirmation reason you mention.
But the reason they intentionally mispell the product names is to confuse spam blockers which is the only way they get through in the first place.
__________________
James Kendrick* ...using mobile devices since they weighed 30 lbs
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06-25-2004, 04:17 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Apr 2003
Posts: 5
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Re: Two schools of thought...
The single biggest problem with both schools is that they are both correct and both wrong.
1) Unsubscribing works only with "legit" spam, but at the same time, confirms the email address as valid. You may not get anymore spam from the company you "unsubscribed" from, but at the same time, you confirmed it is a valid email address, and they will often sell your address, so you end up getting more, not less.
2) Ignoring spam, or using an inbox filter of some sort (like qurb or spamassasin or such) still doesn't stop spam completely because of the l33t spellings, but can help some. The fundamental problem, though, is that they didn't get a NDR from an invalid address, so they keep using the address. This has slowed down somewhat as ISPs start learning that they have to block outbound NDRs to the Internet, so spammers can no longer tell if an address is valid or not based on receipt of a NDR, but this is a relatively new thing for many ISPs, so it will take a while to filter through.
3) As was pointed out in another thread, SPAM will always be a step ahead of things like spam filters, since the filter can't always be depended on to recognize a pattern correctly, so even though it doesn't appear in your Inbox, you still have to doublesheck the junkmail folder and sort through it (even if only a cursory glance is given) just to make sure your filters haven't decided that someone you correspond with is a junk sender.
In my opinion, SPAM will only be stopped when itis no longer profitable. So long as spammers can send out hundreds of thousands of emails with little or no cost, they'll keep doing so. As a spammer, even with a .05% rate of response, you're getting something (a prospect or customer) for nothing.
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06-25-2004, 04:17 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 1,097
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anyone have a link to that spam song?
I hate spam
spam spam spam spam spam spamimity spam spam
stop singing!
spam spam spam ...
__________________
Please see www.grlt.com "Tech with a twist of lime!"
The Midlands Hybrid Club MidlandsHybrid.com
Current: Kacey's Wing, T-mo Wing Past: GCM_T, T-Mobile MDA |
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06-25-2004, 04:20 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 291
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Exchange 2003s built in mail filters seems to get a good 98% of the rubbish the only ones it has trouble with are these wierd empty ones.
I block most domains including hotmail and yahoo, if anyone I know has these addresses they go in the safe list and they go to my inbox
Outlook 2003 blocks loading the pics and I never unsubscribe from them.
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06-25-2004, 04:26 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 559
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You chouldn't have a post about Spam without Monty Python references! Very good! "Baked beans are off!"
Anyway, I unsubscribe occationally. I use Outlook's Junk Senders list sometimes, but I mostly just delete the spam as it comes. My problem is that I never have the time to unsubscribe. "That was never 5 minutes just now!"
:mrgreen:
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06-25-2004, 04:29 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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May I be the first to complement Kati on a very well put together poll, which really covered all the eventualities, especially those of the Monty Python lovers  .
Ive been using hotmail as my primary mail account for ages, and recently their spam filters have become very good, resulting in most of my "spam" being newsletters i have subscribed to long time ago, but are no longer interested in. Ive unsubscribed from some of them, but some just refuse to stop coming (e.g the hewlett packard critical update newsletter).
In short, however, recently spam has not been a problem at all (which is a pity, as Ive been enjoying the game of creating regex to catch them without killing all my other mail with MailWasher Pro).
Surur
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06-25-2004, 04:35 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 484
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Re: Spam Egg Spam Spam Bacon And Spam
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Kati Compton
Even more bizarre - are you going to buy l33t medicine? V14gr4 or Z4n4x or something? Who are the people buying from these spam emails?
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In some cases - nobody. There are certain spam messages that are sent only for the purpose of getting lists of vaild addresses to sell to other spammers based on the unsubscribes. They might only have an unsubscribe link and you might not find a link to buy anything in the spam itself.
Of course, the worst spam now is the "phishing" messages. Made to look like they are from the security department of Citibank, eBay, PayPal, etc. Some are even linked to very real looking copies of the company's web site and are used to get unsuspecting users to enter their account and access numbers. Never, ever click on a link in an email from your bank, etc. I take the time to send the raw text of each such message I receive to the company's fraud department. It's the only spam I do anything with besides remove it from my server (before downloading via Mailwasher.)
By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:
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06-25-2004, 04:36 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,264
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Actually, between spam filters and common sense on the ones that get through, I very rarely end up opening Spam. Therefore, I would not know if there was an unsubscribe link or not.
Like others have said, if it is actually something I signed up for, I will unsubscribe. Otherwise, if they resort to SPAM in the first place, I have very little faith they will honor my request. Even if they did, the probably unsubscribe me from their list and then resell my address as a verified one.
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06-25-2004, 04:50 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Re: Spam Egg Spam Spam Bacon And Spam
Quote:
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Originally Posted by daS
By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:
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My, how very devious! :-)
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