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Hi. I'm in the anti-spam business. You got lucky.

A lot of spammers use fake unsubscribe links as a way of verifying your address and the fact that you read the message. Some questionable businesses have verification elements to their unsubscribe links that will note the fact that you visited the site but then due to a bug fail to process your unsubscribe attempt (thus netting the same effect).

I will sometimes unsubscribe from things, but that's because I want to see how successful it was (and I can deal with the trouble caused by attracting more spam). I do not suggest this for others. Use sites like myWOT to research the link before trusting it enough to follow it and perform the request. Use sites like SpamCop and KnujOn (and, if you're in France, Signal Spam, which has legal enforcement power) to report anything else as spam. All of those reporting agencies are tied to actual enforcement (in some way; KnujOn busts registrars, SpamCop informs network operators (and builds its blocklist), Signal Spam prosecutes if in France).

Old people are full of wisdom and experience, but unfortunately also prejudice. Don't tell me what works and what is futile. If you have that attitude, and refuse working for a better earth, know that you are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem. If you are old and tired, psychologically or physically, please don't pacify the next generation.

I remember my dad replied "but that is an utopia, it is idealistic," clearly trying not to be bothered by my preaching. I thought of this and later I realized, utopic and idealism is relative. We have more then enough food, and every single piece of it is wrapped in plastic. Isn't that an idealistic thought a hundred years ago? The world is a better place because of a few idealistic individuals. Be the change in the world you want to see.

http://www.knujon.com/
http://www.kiva.org/

If a major player, usually seen as a freemail provider like google or yahoo, but certainly also any large corporation or government agency, were to simply start reporting their spam, the problem would go away.

Beef up and aid services like KnujOn and SpamCop and remove the ease of sending spam and (more importantly) the profitability. But that only goes so far -- it nails the pseudo-legit spammers, but it only slightly hampers the straight-up criminal ones (while eliminating their competition).

The next step is escalation; like Blue Security, create a do-not-email list (using hashed emails for privacy) and then after a lack of response from SpamCop's reports, utilize the opt-out requirement of the CAN-SPAM law to essentially flood the spammer with unsubscribe requests. I've detailed this proposal, along with how to decentralize it to make it immune to the DDoS that stopped Blue Software, on my website at http://khopesh.com/wiki/Ending_spam

But how many of those trillion pages have unique, useful content? E-mail is over 95% spam, and the web is getting there.

There were about 153 million registered domains at the beginning of the year. The ones from the spam-friendly registrars are mostly junk. Tim Bernars-Lee said in 2006 that web junk was becoming a major problem, and it's become worse since then.

If you throw out all the anonymous but commercial domains (we call them "bottom-feeders"), as we do with SiteTruth, the Web looks a lot better. Search engines are getting stricter about this. You don't see that many "landing pages" in Google any more. Bad news for companies like Marchex, the publicly traded web spammer that cranks out all those junk "What you need, when you need it" sites.

"The mass trials are going well. There will be fewer Russians, but better ones." - Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

I recommend KnujOn http://knujon.com/ .

So far they've shut down over 13.000 spammer sites.