Slashdot Mirror
Do Unsubscribe Links Stop Spam?
Kaiten writes "Brian McWilliams of Spam Kings fame has just published a fascinating spammer exposé over at Salon. Using a pseudonym, he was hired to send junk email on behalf of a spam operation that has been burying people (me included) with spam for fake Rolex watches. The article details how the spammers handle the 200,000-plus unsubscribe requests they get each month. Seems that LOTS of geeks actually cross their fingers and click those remove links. And, surprise, surprise, the spammers usually ignore the unsubscribe requests."
One thing really missing is a national or perhaps even a global unique "company ID". Law makers are so eager to tag and trace individuals, but ignore company tracking. It is time for a national company-ID number.
Any company that wants to do business in the US would be required to have such a number and include it in any email they send across our borders, perhaps as a new email header attribute. Ideally it would be globally enforced and the US could pressure problem countries such as China to crack down on businesses that abuse email and/or the company number.
There are too many fly-by-night companies running around.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm wondering, you can kill a goldfish by giving it too much food. It just keeps eating and eating until it runs out of food or dies.
Running Spammers out of money just isn't happening, not sure why. But what if we did the opposite? We run the "unsubscribe" link with a script that creates millions of invalid email addresses (on an non existant domain please, not mine). Their system will automatically add it to their database. If enough people do this, what if anything will break? I'm thinking that the signal to noise ratio on their distribution CD's will give them a nightmare of a maintenance issue or make it take to long to transmit overwhelming their SMTP service, but I dunno.
Oz