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

Your friend? Umm yeah. we believe you

[bentfork]

200+ spam mails a day. wtf. You have to try hard to get that much junk mail. ( I know I've done it before... but that is another story...) My guess is that he had subscribed to a lot of opt-in lists, and thought of them as spam. As most /. users know most of the guys/gals running those systems are legit honest people. And therefor he just unsubscribed from the list. The moral of the story is get a email address for friends, for work, and one for mailing lists, and opt ins. I have had a couple email addresses for almost 8 years now and they get 1-2 spam messages a week.

what a nice /. day !

[nsebban]

"Is windows losing ground"
"Does SPAM Unsubscribing Really Work?"

Let me think about all this...well..."no" and "no".