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."
NO
A reply confirms there is a live person behind the email address. And for those with a HTML-enabled email client, a cleverly placed (and sized, ie 1 pixel) embedded image to an external site with a unquie string keyed to your email address is yet another trick spammers have for confirming your address.
expect the unsubscribe link to work?
And if you like what you read you can come and hear the author speak at the MIT Spam Conference on January 21.
John.
..But the big corps too. Coincidentally, I tried to remove myself from the iTunes list (which I had accidentally enlisted for when downloading QT) only the find that the unsubscribe-URL "contained no data". Hmm. Double hmm.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Using the link will
a. confirm your address
b. be ignored / or removed from that 'particular' offer list
c. added to 100s of other lists
unsubscribe is a bit fuzzy
spammer may unsubscibe you from one list, company or offer while adding you to many others
Usually I go through periodically and unsubcribe the ones I can. The volume then goes down for a couple weeks, so it is worth it.
Often, however, the unsubscribe links don't even display a page, much less get me unsubscribed. Porn spam is actually one that I have noticed DOES work more often. I started getting porn spam at work, and being one of the network admins, told the other guys that I would be going to porn spam site to unsubscribe, and they actually worked. That was 1 1/2 months ago, no more porn spam.
Do Unsubscribe Links Stop Spam?
While they don't exactly stop spam, they do prove useful. You can immediately sort possible-spam by whether it offers an unsubscribe option. If it doesn't have it, it's definitely spam. If it does have an unsubscribe link, it's either legit (newsletter perhaps), or spam disguised with a fake unsubscribe. While the fake unsubscribe doesn't really help the end user, it offers a way to track and prosecute those who violate CANSPAM which requires that the unsubscribe option be present in some form, and that it work.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
According to tFA, was that some spammer "affiliates" actually seemed to honor the remove requests.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
That's how I introduced myself last month, when I sent Casper an e-mail asking to join his spamming crew. I fibbed to him that I was a full-time bulk e-mailer looking for a new sponsor. I said that one of my business associates had recommended his program. (For authenticity, I lightly sprinkled typos and grammatical errors throughout the message.)
I wanted to be one of Casper's sales affiliates. In today's world of spam, a sales affiliate sends out junk mail on behalf of a spam-site operator or "sponsor," who assigns the affiliate a special tracking code to include in his e-mail ads. For every sale the affiliate's spams generate, he is paid a commission by the site operator. Sponsors also provide "remove" lists, spamming software, and other support to help their affiliates successfully market the site.
Since September, Casper and his associates had been clogging my various e-mail accounts with ads for a watch shop called Royal-Replicas.com (formerly onlinereplicastore.com). I filed several complaints with the Chinese Internet service provider hosting the site, to no avail.
I suppose I could have just clicked the "unsubscribe" links in the dozen or so spams they sent me every day. But I didn't trust these people one bit. I was sure that if I could get inside Casper's operation, I would find hard evidence confirming what savvy Internet users instinctively know: Trying to unsubscribe from spam is a fool's game.
Just look at the place. Royal-Replicas.com provides no physical mailing address in its junk e-mails or at the site. The domain's registration record lists someone in Spain as the owner. The site is hosted on a server in China, but the order page cites prices in Indian rupees as well as U.S. dollars. The headers of the spams reveal that many have been sent via "zombied" home computers. Even the headers of Casper's private e-mails are a fraud. (He routed all his messages to me through proxy computers in South Korea.)
The "About Us" page at Royal-Replicas.com doesn't help much, either. It contains little more than a bizarre rationale for buying its $300 knockoffs rather than the real thing: "Many people purchase watches that cost thousands of dollars and render the wearer liable to get their hand chopped off while walking home from a posh cocktail party."
Bulk e-mailers are required to honor list-removal requests under the U.S. CAN-SPAM law. But still it's common knowledge that clicking an unsubscribe link or handing over your e-mail address on a junk e-mailer's remove page is insane. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warns that unsubscribe links are "often just a method for collecting valid addresses that are then sent other spam." The FTC has sent warning letters to at least 77 marketers for their failure to honor unsubscribe requests.
Sure, a few spammers might take your name off to avoid trouble. But to most, you're merely confirming that they've found a live one. Next thing you know, they'll have sold your e-mail address to other spammers as "validated" -- or, in other words, ready for spamming.
At least, that's what I thought until Casper brought me onboard. My undercover mission into the heart of fake-Rolex spam didn't turn out exactly as I had expected.
I tried flattering Casper in my e-mails, gushing that he had astutely tapped into a timely and lucrative spamming niche. (You could probably find similar watches on the streets of Chinatown for $25, but hey, some people prefer the convenience of holiday shopping from home.) But Casper doesn't let just anyone join BlackMarketMoney.com. After I sent my introductory e-mail as "Chris Smith" from a free webmail account I had created, he asked to know the name of the person who had referred m
Dent: No, how much?
Prosser: None at all.
> The article details how the spammers handle the 200,000-plus unsubscribe requests they get each month
By a strange coincidence, "none at all" describes the actions taken on 200,000 remove requests a day by a bunch of ape-descended spammers targeting a group of fellow ape-descended lifeforms so amazingly primitive that they still thought that ch33p r0l3x watches were a good idea.
No, I know for sure that they don't help. For years I have been trying to get MORE spam. The main way I have done this has been unsubscribing from lists! In fact, I even "unsubscribe" an address that was never subscribed. Indeed, that new address is now getting plenty of spam.
Unsubscribing from spammer's sites will get you more spam. Unsubscribing from mailing lists will work, of course, but mailing lists != spam.
In my experience, no. There was a time when I was naive enough to think that they would, but unfortunately, experience has proven otherwise.
In fact, I did an informal experiment of my own. I created an email address specifically for this purpose, and posted that address on a few sites. I was getting spam within 2 days (3 messages on day 2). After I got the first spam, I removed my email address from the sites. I also used the unsubscribe link on just one email. Guess what? The volume of spam jumped 400% within 24 hours (12 more messages came in).
Most effective weapon against spam? The delete key.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Now, I don't see what the World Health Organization has to do with spam...
I read Slashdot for the articles
You must be new....uh....to spam :)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
At the very least, however, the same laws which apply to telemarketers should apply to spammers. If I remember correctly, here in the States, if someone recieves a telemarketing call and requests to be removed from the telemarketers' list of numbers, the telemarketing company is required by law to remove that number from their list. The same thing should apply to spammers, and be enforcable with (at the very least) heavy fines.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
"Seems that LOTS of geeks actually cross their fingers and click those remove links"
I really don't agree. Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place, let alone be stupid enough to click the unsubscribe links.
Personally I haven't had more than 30-50 spams in the last 3 years or so.
I have my main address, which only 'real people' know, friends and family. It never gets any spam because it's totally secret.
Then for everything else I assign a throw away address on one of my domains, the mail on these gets checked only when I'm expecting something (like a signup confirmation/verification etc).
I also have a semi-secret address to give slightly less trustworthy people and to date that hasn't had any spam either.
Obviously I make sure none of my addresses get posted in plain text on the internet either.
It is simply a matter of keeping your address clean. The only way spammers can send me mail right now is if they brute force my email address, and that doesn't happen very often.
Unsubscribe generally does work for legitimate mass mailings, ie the ones you had to sign up for in the first place. It doesn't work for true SPAM, and indeed as others have pointed out, tends to actually make the problem worse.
It's amazing that this is considered "news", but I guess you have to repeat experiments every so often to prove that the theories they provide support for still hold water.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Evolution lets you skip loading external/embedded images, by default, if that option is selected. I'd like to have an extra filter in there: white/blacklists (in my contact list) for message senders and image SRC URL patterns - all default to "NO". That way, senders/servers I trust - they already have my email/IP#/existence confirmed from other messages - send mesages that aren't broken. The rest can go to hell. A good filter would find messages that point at untrusted servers, and add their senders to the blacklist. That kind of Evolution plugin, with spamfilter against the blacklist, would go a long way towards suffocating the spammers drowning us in privacy invasions. And also make Evolution a much more attractive draw than, say, Outlook, for people who use their computer to communicate with other people, not with machines or reptillian spammers.
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make install -not war
This has been going on since before the days of the (long since defunct) IEMMC with their bogus remove list, which was back in 1997 or so.
Here's one article that was written about the IEMMC.
Yea it is nice. But unfortunatly I wish I had a feature to select all my spam. and forward it to spam@ftc.gov keeping all the headers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm actually (at the cost of some traffic) using this to help me fight spam...
It's not just that spammers are ignoring these requests, they will actually just merge their lists with the responses (on the off chance that you might try to also unsubscribe some of your other email addresses / or a friend's email address).
In fact, if you enter just a random address in there, you can be pretty sure that this address will get spammed in the future, too.
If you use bayesian filter software, like bogofilter or spamprobe, you can turn this into an advantage. I've actually "unregistered" some previously non-existent email address on my internet domain that I'm not going use anywhere else. Now I know that any email coming in for that address is definitely spam - and can hence use it to automatically improve bogofilter/spamprobe by passing that email from procmail into them with the spam "learn" flags set.
Of course they don't. If anything,unsubsribing will triple the spam you do get.
Besides filtering spam I started creating a seperate email alias for every website I need an email address on. When that alias starts to get spam I delete it, and I know where its coming from.
The most surprising place I ever get spam from is sears. I think they have someone on the inside selling their customer list because I will start getting spam about 2 weeks after ordering something.
Before I was getting around 30 spams a day, now about 2 to 4. One problem with unsubscribing to spam, I noticed if you do it every day you continue to get the spam. On their opt out links they say something like please allow 7 days for their servers to delete you. Guess what after 6 days and you unsubscribe again, they wait to those new 7 days are up. It really works, though not all spams have unsubscribing, and usually it takes a while to hunt and find the link. The worst is medical sites I can never find them, http://lcv.pharmnnfh.com/ help me find the link. What really needs to happen is the people who work in the spam division at gmail, hotmail, and yahoo need to get their acts together and put together pages where you can mass unsubscribe to these things.
with spam for fake Rolex watches.
I once saw an actual brand called "Relox". By changing the spelling they could legally get away with it, at least in the short-term until Rolex sues them for confusing consumers, which takes longer in the courts than direct rip-offs.
Anyhow, another annoying repeating spam is the one with the red box in the upper left selling penis pills. It comes in as an embedded image from different sources. The only constant is that it is always the same image. My filter can only filter by whole words rather than parts of the (ASCII encoded) image.
I was in the process of building my own email filtering system with all kinds of "indicators" such as marks saying the email had HTML or image references and suspicious key words, but I didn't trust my own message parsing algorithm as far as isolating and altering messages and attachments as units. I am thus looking for libraries that do the basic parsing for me. I can then add the logic to screen and rank the content. I've been dabbling a bit in TCL of late, so TCL libraries may be the way to go.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
What a great article. I think more of us nerds should infiltrate the spammers and see if there is any way to shut them down. I realize that is a lot more work, but how much work do you spend filtering, or deleting spam each day?
On a related topic, I used to get 25-30 emails per day to the email address that is on my whois registration. Recently I had to renew my domain name and I noticed that my registrar offered an email address encryption. By selecting this option my spam emails went from 25 per day to 2 or 3 per day! I was astounded at the scum who are using the whois information to spam people.
So if you own a domain name, check to see if your registrar is offering a similar service.
- Bruzer
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
Much of spam that I get doesn't contain ANY usable information or links at all. And sometimes there are links, but they aren't even valid URLs.
What the hell is the point of spamming people with ads when they won't be able to get back to you to buy your product?
I clicked on the link unsubscribe to some Microsoft spam and it tried to force me to signup for passport, including a long... questionare asking lots of questions about me
I sent a email to customer service to complain. I got a response back from a customer service drone (human) that offered to unsubscribe me if I just gave him all the information needed to create a passport account for me... so he could opt me out of future spam.
I had some time to kill, so I replyed with a reference to the new spam law with a reminder that his reply acknolged my request to not send spam, so if I did get any more then Microsoft would be in violation of the law, passport account not withstanding.
So, four opt out attempts and three emails, but I did finally opt out... from one sender that is well known and has deep pockets and very sueable. Small spam outfits... forget it.
Sorry for the latin, but I've always wanted to use that bit seriously just once...
Just because your spam dropped at that point that doesn't mean it was due to your unsubscribing session. There are many reasons why your spam levels fell. Perhaps your ISP/mail provider installed better spam filtering, perhaps the spammers responsible for a large proportion of your junk mail were shut down one way or another, etc.
There are many possible causes for the effect, so don't assume that you using the unsubscribe links was the catalyst for the change. That could have been it, but that's not necessarily it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Heck, legitimate businesses often either ignore or don't test their unsubscribe systems.
I signed up for emails from History Channel a year or so ago. A couple of months ago I decided I didn't really want them any more. I clicked on every unsubscribe link they sent me, probably a total of 6 or 8 of them over 2+ months. Finally I sent them an email telling them they'd better honor it or have a lawyer familiar with CAN-SPAM.
To their credit, I got a hand-written email back within 12 hours and I haven't gotten any more promotional emails from them. But it's pretty obvious that their unsubscribe system wasn't working when I tried to use it.
I've received several pieces of spam lately where the URL of the website being advertised (the subject varies, free porn, free downloads, etc) is invalid... In fact, the only valid domain in these e-mails was in the unsubscribe link. I can only conclude that the purpose of this e-mail is to harvest the e-mail address of people who 'unsubscribe.'
"almost 200% effective against porn spam"
So... it reduced your incoming porn spam by 200%. Which means you somehow processed negative numbers of porn spam. Which, to balance the books, must mean you became a net exporter of porn spam? :-)
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Cthulhu holiday songs, for the gift that keeps on loathing.
www.salon.com/news/cookie.html
make it the first page before you visit the main salon.com site and it will bypass them forcing you to watch an ad.
I use it religiously.
-Meow.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
They take the unsub requests and diff them against their mailing lists. That allows them to quickly and easily compile a list of active suckers, I mean mailboxes. They in turn sell their new list of active mailboxes to other spammers. Thus causing the sucker to get more spam.
Spammers also take the list of unsub requests and flat out spam them, no questions ask, too. Anyone that gets themselves on that list is guaranteed to get the living hell spammed out of them because the list is in the hands of active spammers, not website scrappers trying to sell the list.
I have about a dozen domains I set up for the sole purpose of hosting spamtraps. I took a list of proper pronouns and compiled a list of just over 525,000 spamtrap addresses per domain. I used pronouns so that the spamtraps would have a legitimate appearance (some spammers got wise to the way of random characters). So I had this enormous list of spamtraps and I had Razor and Pyzor set up to submit spam to the DB. I also hadm y good buddy Procmail set up to munge the spamtrap address and forward a copy to NANAS and the FTC. So how did I go about getting the spammers to spam me you ask? Hell that was the easiest part of all. I automated the stuffing of their unsubscribe boxes with my spamtraps addresses. I used NANAS to find current (and active) unsubribe forms. I then either used wget or curl and some shell scripting to stuff the boxes, depending on whether they were POST or GET forms. Simple. Within minutes I was getting spam. Within a few days I was getting over 30,000 pieces of spam per day. That was after stuffing perhaps a dozen unique unsub forms. I stopped stuffing them after that because the flow of spam was saturating my cable connection. I have a co-lo that doesn't charge me by bandwidth. I should fire up the spamtraps again. This time I'll add DCC.
i've never ever gotten a personal email asking me if i want to opt out, so i set up a filter to block anything that has the word "unsuscribe" in it. worked out well.
swanker than you
The best way is to run your own mail server and simply prevent the spammers from connecting. One way is to add blackhole lists to your MTA (Sendmail, or whatever). That really did cut my spam quite a bit. But recently I noticed I was still getting quite a bit of spam directly from China and Korea decided to get tough and start blocking net ranges completely. I had tried blocking SMTP from a few /8 address ranges before, but this time I didn't want to unnecessarily block Australia or Japan, so I took the time to look at the /16 level to find sub-ranges to block.
It's already working, too. Here are the ranges I've added so far. (The second column is the number of connection attempts that were rejected.) At this point, I only plan to add new blocks as I encounter them in actual spam.
Oh, and those first two lines? Google for Cyvelliance and you'll understand why they're there.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Two years ago, it had gotten to the point that I was getting over 200 pieces of spam a day, and not the yummy kind that comes in a tin. Before initiating an email address change, I decided to try an experiment: see if clicking those unsubscribe links actually did anything. So, for one week, I followed the unsubscribe instructions on every piece of spam I got. The result: a 2/3 reduction in spam. That's pretty significant, but hardly worth the effort in my case, as I was still getting dozens of piece of spam a day, and unless you keep up with the unsubscribing, it just goes back up to the previous level within a few weeks, anyway.
So, yeah, you CAN reduce the amount of spam, but it becomes a regular maintenance task every day, and really isn't worth it in the end.
My advice: get your own domain and handle your own email accounts. Create special ones that simply forward to your main email address, to use on sites that require an email address for full functionality, and when you start getting spam, you know where it came from, and can shut that particular email forwarder down. It's a bit of a pain, but a LOT LESS pain than trying to unsubscribe from spam.
Obviously, anti spam tools like bayesian filters and what-not are always a good idea, but can let spam get through, and can block some wanted emails.
YMMV (but probably won't).
" I wanna be handsome geek." That's an oxymoron of which I am reminded every day when I look in the mirror.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Actually...I hate to tell you guys this, but most spammers use those unsubscribe requests all right. They use them to verify that the email address is active, and it goes into a higher priority hit list. Even if they're in the US where the law says they must honor your unsub request, there's nothing that says they can't sell the information to other spammers that this is an actively used email address with a real live person on the other end of it.
About 18 months ago I did a little experiment. I set up my own junk inboxes at different email services and started handing them out. Three of them I unsub'd every spam email I got, and the other three I didn't. Guess which one eventually ended up getting buried in 10 times more spam...
I have a friend that is quite intelligent. He did a spin on the same idea, and I recommend it to anyone that wants to cut their spam to one or two mails per week (or you could just get a gmail account--I only get a few spam messages per week over there). Here's how it works...
Go out to every free email service you can get your hands on that supports POP3 download. Hand those addresses out to every spam list you can get your hands on. Periodically (every hour or so) download those messages into your Bayesian spam filter, marking them as spam (salearn that comes with spam assassin, for instance). I know of no better way to train your filter system and keep your spam stats up-to-date.
Of course, this isn't totally free of manual intervention. There's the initial setup of all this, which is more or less a one-time thing, but for it to truly work well, you have to make sure you also pipe all your regular mail (ham, as spam assassin calls it) into your Bayesian filter as non-spam mail, and if any spam does show up at your regular address, make sure you sort it into a separate folder and deal with it as spam. The spammers are getting more and more clever every day, and the line between spam and ham gets ever fainter, requiring that much more learning by the filtering system to keep straight what's what. But it's really not more work than you go through anyway, and you'll collect far more stats to use against the spammers than you otherwise would.
And let's not forget the best part, either. Signing up for and collecting all that spam costs spammers a little change (though, you could argue it also costs the hosts of your spam accounts, though you can delete the downloaded messages off the server every hour as part of the d/l to try and minimize impact on them).
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
That would work if the spam correctly reported its origin.
But that's not in the spammer's best interest. It's better for them to use zombies and open relays.
You'll bounce their message to a server that didn't send it and they'll bounce a message to you saying that such-and-such person isn't there...
It's better to just delete them (after sending the headers to spamcop).
instead of having the list have email addresses stored, why not just long hashes of those email addresses. then, the spammers just hash the email address, submit to the list to see if its there, and do whatever based on if it is or not. anyway, not perfect, because people still wont follow the rules, but it provides at least a little wall of protection because SOME people would use it.
Get your own internet domain (and ideally a provider that allows you free use of subdomains) and that problem is solved permanently, as you can assign new addresses for every single contact and purpose. e.g. my (visiting) card has one specific email address I don't give out anywhere else, and since that address only exists in print, it's fairly safe from spam harvesters... ...similarly, every company I order something from gets an address in the form of companyname.com@biz.mydomain.tld
.*-biz@... to a business mailbox and somespammingidiot-biz@... straight into bogofilter / the trash...
That way, I can easily filter out all business related emails (*@biz.) to one mailbox, and in case one of those starts spamming, I will send every future email to that recipient address to bogofilter without even looking at it any more...
(If you're not allowed sub-domains, it's not too much of a problem either; in that case instead of companyname.com@biz... use something like companyname.com-biz@...
That still allows you to procmail
Benedikt
From the link you referenced:
The conference is free, but please register if you want to attend.
We will send you a message containing a link that you can use to confirm your registration.
(Don't use an address with over-aggressive spam filtering set up on it, because if our message bounces you won't be able to confirm it.)
So we are supposted to register for a free conference, on a web forum where they will send us an email? Oh yeah and by the way use a real email address, we promise not to spam you.
What crazyness.
- Bruzer
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
1) Use a long email address that is difficult to brute-force
2) Only give it to real people
3) Use a mailinator address for online registrations and whatnot where you have to read a reply.
4) For those sites that force you to reply from a real email address to complete registration, use a spam webmail address.
This has stopped almost all spam from bugging me.
Anecdote: My first email address ever was from Cornell in 1990. Cornell has a policy that lets you keep your email address for life by setting up an auto-forward after you graduate. The irony is that Cornell, back in the days before spam, unfortunately picked an address format (initials+number@cornell.edu) that turned out to be easy to brute-force, and that I've since had to turn the auto-forward feature off due to too much spam, defeating the purpose of the "lifetime email address". oh well...
Check out U.S. Bank's Unsubscribe page. Basically what you do is click no on everything, put a checkmark in the checkbox and click the submit button.
The interesting thing is it asks if you're 13 years old or more. If you choose "No" then it won't let you unsubscribe. So if you're under 13 and truthful then there's no way to stop getting mail from them. And one could argue that no 13 year old has a bank account but then, why would they ask the age?
I just thought that was interesting.
I have gone through AT&T's unsubscribe process many times, to no avail. Even though they tell me they'll stop sending me 'promotional' email, they still do. I have reported it to the FTC, and am planning to take my service elsewhere.
The FTC did reply to say that not unsubscribing someone, even if they are your customer, is in violation of CANSPAM. They were less than clear as to whether or not they'd actually do anything about it.
The only way to really get rid of spammers, and this includes "legitimate" spammers like our friend Scotty, is for the feds to get serious about prosecuting them. And I don't mean filing charges based on some kooky new anti-spam law that is full of loopholes. Take them down like they did Al Capone. Start investigating known spammers for all different kinds of law violations, like tax law, interstate commerce law, licensing regulations (do those online pharmacies that have operations in the US have proper licenses?) and other general business regulations. I'll be willing to bet that almost all spammers are breaking a law in some way. Find that, shut them down, and others will get the hint. Sure, some people will continue to do it, but the volume of spam will decrease as the overall cost of sending spam increases.
I have an account at my university that I used when Usenet was the thing, aka 15 YEARS AGO. I never played with it outside of there, and I used to have a few thousand emails waiting for me every few months. Only recently did I forward everything to /dev/null.
More recently, I returned to a consulting job I had left 6 years prior, around the start of the WWW days, when Usenet was pretty much the big thing. I re-opened my closed account, and received 50 spams within 30 minutes. Eesh.
My addresses were obviously harvested from Usenet archives (or maybe groups.google.com, but I digress). I pity the people who buy these 'guaranteed' lists of email addresses, expecting all addresses to work.
Set up your mail to automatically look for 'opt-out' links and access them - and even fill in the form automatically - now for the bonus, if you get any mail from that place after 24 hours your program should hit the opt-out 10 times with 9 non-existant email accounts, if they still dont stop mailing you you keep doubling that 20, 40, 80 etc. If they are infact using the opt-out form to check if your account is real/read then they will start trying to spam all the other accounts (that don't exist) too. By even having an opt-out link that takes you to a web-page they are giving you an open door to hit them with, take advantage of it and kick them in the balls.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Some spammers use "Unsubscribe Link" as a mechanism to verify the validity of the email addresses.
Also the URLs for images in HTML emails are tailored to confirm that you have actually opened the email and your email-id is valid.
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Anand Babu