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Opting Out Increases Spam?
J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"
Is my email address being harvested when I opt out?
Yes.
You've validated to the spammers that your email address is being actively read, and that you actually READ spam. You have confirmed to them that you are an excellent use of their resources.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
If spammers will not honour our private property rights by stealing our bandwidth and mail server ressources, what makes you think that they will honour requests not to be spammed again?
Worse, "opting" out confirms that the e-mail address the spam has be sent to is valid!!!
You never opt-out of spams, you LART their upstreams until they have no more connectivity.
Exactly. If this is a newsletter that you've opted in to, then you can safely opt out.
If you didn't opt-in in the first place what makes you think they're going to act faithfully with an opt-out request?!
All that opting out does in those circumstances is prove that your address is an active one, and that makes it loads more valuable, so they'll sell it on to their spammers as a premium "active email address!
How on earth did this make any part of slashdot at all?
As someone who does responsible e-mail marketing, please let me make a distinction between that and spamming.
If you are getting notices to enhance your johnson or "Che@p drug$" or whatever, DO NOT use the "opt out" link. It confirms your e-mail address is functional. In fact don't open them at all. Report them as spam and help your ISP improve their filters.
HOWEVER, if you are receiving e-mail marketing you just don't want anymore--like say the daily deal e-mail from Expedia*--please use the opt-out link to cancel your subscription. Deleting them won't stop the flow, and marking them as spam hurts deliverability reputation, making it harder to get them to people who actually want them.
Perhaps I'll get modded down for saying this, but e-mail marketing can be done responsibly and is a big part of many legitimate businesses. I think this sometimes gets lost in the War On Spam.
* I don't work for them, this is just an example of an e-mail marketing that I know I get.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
marketing from an otherwise legitimate company, opting out will work, but for spammers it just makes things worse. Spammers count on two things, that they just need a tiny percentage to respond to their solicitations, and that the rest of us will ignore it. Once a year I make a point of researching the complete header of spam and reporting them to their ISP and any law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction. They are engaged in fraud in the traditional sense of the term, so are violating existing laws. They are counting on the rest of us to just delete them and not lodge a complaint.
Not just a newsletter, but any place that you know is a legitimate website/business, etc. should be more than safe to opt out of, because they have to adhere to CAN-SPAM Act or similar laws/regulations in other countries. Not only that, they may have a reputation worth upholding.
Virtually everything else is going to be a red flag to send you even more spam. They have zero accountability, and no incentive to stop because they are probably stealing the bandwidth from someone else's compromised PC anyway.
Really, this should be common sense for most of the Slashdot readership.
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Spamming is not, and has never been a freedom of speech issue; it's a property rights issue. The spammer has no more right to use my equipment than they do to spray paint their message on my garage door.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I am not from the US and cannot see a connection between freedom of speech for people and businesses having the right to say or do anything at all.
Freedom of speech for people is undoubtedly a cornerstone of a free (civilised) society. What has that got to do with the right of even a legitimate company to say something? Freedom for business is a good thing to but as soon as they trample on freedoms of human beings, that should be very closely examined!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Actually, I think you are wrong. That's not 1st Amendment protected behavior.
I can grab a soapbox and proceed to a public area and start to give my speech about how the squirrels are really intelligent and are conspiring to take over the Earth and force us into slavery in their nut mines.
That is a public area and I was just speaking.
I cannot do the same thing on private property for obvious reasons.
There really is no difference between email and regular paper mail conceptually. It is the same thing, and has associated costs with the infrastructure and delivery. Both "boxes" can be considered real property. In this case of email, 99.999999% (in some cases, 100%) of its traffic occurs over private property.
I don't think the 1st Amendment protects any businesses behavior of placing onto your property whatever they wish. Of course, it's undesirable and understood that nobody wants it. I have a hard time believing it is a fundamental right.
If that were true, conceptually it would be possible for me to legally and literally pile thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pieces of paper at your doorstep supporting my own political/religious beliefs and advertising my products and services. I know you will say, "but that is harassment and not reasonable". Fair enough, but why? I would propose it is because I am causing you damage at some point? Okay. Where do we draw the lines? Both junk mail and spam are seriously draining our resources, at many levels. That is clearly damaging to many people.
At some point we have to be reasonable and see that is not something we are trying to protect with our Constitution.
You mention we have no obligation to listen, yet we are forced to "listen" to all this crap by letting the junk mail into our mailboxes and the spam into our Inboxes. I think it is perfectly reasonable, and in no way an over reaction, to limit businesses (which are not people anyways) to sending physical mail and email only to existing business relationships. At least at that point there is mutual consent.
I think you have the 1st Amendment, speech, and the written word confused. Yes, the Constitution is designed to protect our rights to express ourselves with the written word as well as speech. However, it does not give us universal rights on the distribution of those written words.
If I put a collection of my written words available in a single place (a website for example) I think I should be Constitutionally protected while doing so. If I start "throwing" those collections of written words willy nilly around the U.S without any consideration of what private property they trespass and ultimately land upon, I think at that point I am out of line.
Simple... even from a "brute force" zombie spammer's perspective, having a list of guaranteed active mail addresses that are actually read will result in a lot more hits than misses. By opting out to non solicited spam from a "hostile" source and confirming the account is active and has someone actually reading junkmail in the process, one only makes the spammers' job easier. Also, your email address increases in value when being sold inbetween spammers. Effectively, you make the A-list among spammers. Having an opt out bit to catch the most naive users would be an investment so to speak. Then again, as you say not all spammers do this.