Does SPAM Unsubscribing Really Work?

dacarr asks: "An associate on a mailing list I am on recalled an article (which he, in turn, does not recall), in which the author managed to reduce his spam some 80% by, of all things, using the provided 'unsubscribe' mechanism in the messages. This is totally counterintuitive to what most of us have learned (doing so was a spectacularly good way to actually *confirm* your address) - but perhaps this isn't the case anymore, based on this. Has anyone else had any luck as far as this goes? By following the aforementioned unsub links, said associate found a number of broken links and dead addresses (and one link that tried to create an attachment and email it out (which he stopped)), but after three days and 400 unsub links, he trimmed his spam levels 'from an average of 250 a day to just 40 today' - that's just around 17% of what he was getting. Maybe spammers are getting their act together and listening for a change." Do any of you have any anecdotal evidence to provide to confirm or contradict this? Have you been able to lower your spam volume by "unsubscribing"?

Comments

I tried it once

[IIEFreeMan]

It reduced the flow for a month or two and then as soon as your email is selled again (with the added value of being verified) the spam comes again full strength :(

my 2c

Re:I tried it once

[Jahf]

This is exactly my experience. About a year ago I decided to unsub from SPAM whenever it came in.

After about a month of effort, I reduced my SPAM by more than 1/2 for a short while. Within 3 months I was at a higher level than before.

Just because you unsub from the SPAM source doesn't mean your address is removed from the databases / CDs that the SPAM source purchased. It is the harvesters that are truly evil.

And I have a number of addresses that have never been published and yet occasionally show up with SPAM. I wouldn't be surprised if the harvesters are making use of Outlook addressbook exploits to further harvest.

Pure Luck?

[Sandman1971]

Maybe it was shear luck? I tested this out about 6 months ago. I created a honeypot email address that appeared on a website for a total of 24 hours. Got a little bit of spam on the account. When I unsubscribed (the ones which didn't bounce back, etc...), the amount of spam I started to receive grew expotentionally. So in my personal experience, unsubscribing still does nothing more than confirm your email address.

Re:Pure Luck?

[Just Some Guy]

By the way, the first line of my reply was lacking the /> tag that seemed obvious at the time. I didn't really think that you used an address at honeypot.net.

Unsubscribe links make cash

[mcgroarty]

You'll find that a lot of the spammers present a load of banners on the unsubscribe page. There are still banner advertisers willing to pay per impression instead of per click, believe it or not, and this is one way of getting those in everybody's face.

For what it's worth, I read an article similar to this one about a year ago. I clicked all the opt out links in my Yahoo account and continued to discard spam unread in my self-run account. I'm only one guy, which makes this statistically insignificant (and thus, it would be highly irresponsible to do something like writing an article about it!), but I can definitely confirm that the Yahoo spam skyrocketed while my other account stayed the same.

Do not attempt this, you will get more spam

[sa3]

I "unsubscribed" a unique spam trap email address and it started recieving spam a few months later.

Re:Not entirely the same method, but effective any

[MarkGriz]

If you don't happen to have your own domain, you can get the same benefits you described by setting up a Spamgourmet account.

You create throwaway addresses on the fly (just make them up - no logging in) and email gets forwarded to your real address. Works great for addresses you only expect to receive a few emails from (like when registering for NYT, etc), as the address automatically expires once you receive a certain number of emails. If you want to continually receive email at that address, you can specify an exclusive sender (by email address or domain) to allow email to come in indefinitely.

Works great and is free too.

Re:Yes, it works.

[jqh1]

use spamgourmet, then you don't have to worry about the checkboxes.

[disclaimer: I'm associated with spamgourmet -- if that bugs you, please *don't* follow the link :) ]

Re:No, it doesn't

[Blakey Rat]

Not that anyone on Slashdot cares, but the proper way of using "spam" to refer to unwanted email is to use normal capitalization, i.e. "spam" or "Spam" and *not* all-caps, as the SPAM meat product's trademark is all-caps.

The SPAM and the Internet FAQ is located here:
http://spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

no

[Anonymous Coward]

I was curious about this several years ago, so I decided that for every single spam sent to my netscape.net account, I would go through the unsubscribe process. I have been doing this religiously for about three years now. The volume of spam has slowly but steadily increased during that time. Half the unsub links are broken, and those that are typically send me five copies of the same message. The ones that do listen go away, but that doesn't matter. It's the ones that don't that constantly increase as the list is sold again and again. It is sort of like using antibiotics against infection. It works for a little while, but then you weed out the stoppable ones and the more hardy strains remain and thrive. Keep in mind I've been doing this for over three years now. Opt-out does not work.