Slashdot Mirror
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?"
A better Ask Slashdot question would have been: "how can I forge bounce messages so that they think my email address is invalid?"
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
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?
Have you *lost* your bandwidth or mail server resources? I'm not trying to justify spam, but let's not use incendiary terms when there exists a perfectly valid alternative: bandwidth-and-mail-server-infringement. Resource sharing is the future; the ultimate goal of cloud computing. Instead of trying to stamp out spam, people need to change their reading models. It's not our job to support obsolete reading models, and it's arrogant to expect us to.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You would think so. What is interesting is the submitter is a 5 digit slashdotter.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
What if someone has forged the BofA email headers? Or the Yahoo headers. I've seen this all too often.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
...what makes you think they're going to act faithfully with an opt-out request?!
I've recently begun to receive spam emails from supply companies in my field, usually disguised as a "newsletter" that I can opt out of.
Mainstream companies are beginning to lose their fear of spamming (technical equipment) customers.
Does anybody read any other responses before posting??
How many times has the same answer been given ?!?!
I ignore spam, but unsubscribe from any other advertisement sent my way. I have also embarked on a campaign to reduce my internet footprint by axing nearly everything I can. (It's impossible, but I still try.) I've gone from a hundred spams a day to less than 10--usually two or three.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
It was Seth Godin who pointed out that anyone seriously involved in marketing (as opposed to someone bulk-emailing thousands of people trying to sucker a precious two or three) would absolutely hate hate hate to alienate individuals by annoying them with unwanted messages
And yet almost universally doing business with a web-based company will get you signed up for their spam list under the guise of a "prior business relationship." They don't ask you if you want their crapmail, they just sign you up automatically. Maybe, if you are lucky, somewhere in their account settings (if they have 'accounts') is a place you can uncheck to turn off the crapmail. Until they reset their database and start sending it again.
The "prior business relationship" justification is just bullshit. If I want their crapmail I will explicitly request it. Otherwise they can fuck off.
Its gotten so bad now that I almost always use mailinator type addresses for online purchases. All I need is the usually instantaneous receipt via email and then I don't want to hear from them again unless there is a fuck-up with order fulfilment or delivery, which I can usually check on myself using the info on the receipt.
Only old people and spammers use email.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
EVER so true. And let me be the first to warn you: Signing up with "DICE.COM" will result in MASSIVE amounts of spam. Interestingly enough, though, since I own the domain I used, I have abilities to collect relief under the CAN-SPAM act and sent out a couple of threats to that end. It still took about two months before the email stopped... but they stopped.
My best advice to people who get too much spam is to stop using their email address, create some new ones and adopt new, more paranoid habits when using your email address and grant acceptance to the fact that you WILL get spam. You will get less when you stop being a dumbass.
At my last job, I tried to issue this advice to the users of the company email domain which was simply flooded with spam and it was not received well... they were already accustomed to doing their personal business on the company's accounts and weren't about to change. There was a remarkable decrease in spam when I installed ESVA and tweaked it to block out nearly all email originating or passing through countries outside of the U.S., but this is not an acceptable solution for most circumstances. It rather helps when you have control over the servers and domain you are using.
If someone stands in the street telling people the world is ending, fine, what-ever. Now if they walk into your living room and do the same thing, sighting free speech, I'm sure you will still call the cops!
...their right to speak does not obligate you to listen.
By sending their speech directly into my private inbox, they are in a way forcing me to listen, since I have to trudge through their subject lines in order to delete them.
The opt-out links I've used actually did seem to work - both for legit companies I had prior business with and typical spam. But I haven't dealt with spam in ages. Hotmail filters it out well and gets far less than my Gmail account. I have no need to deal with spam anymore, other than baiting Nigerians.
I get tons of spam at work (and don't filter anything, so I see it all) and I have yet to a "modern" (within the last few years) spam that contains a valid method of contacting people in order to opt out. The majority of crap I see is from bogus addresses with no way to reply back.
Here's one that just came in, from Bakhshian - resonant@drtinker.com :
Sentimental songs which were composed entirely her how i ne
Sex & Ayyurveda (link to some yahoo groups page I dunno)
I told you so, exclaimed jose triumphantly, there by the power of his art,
to restore us to our he rapidly turned over the leaves of this volume few
things about which i want to ask his advice. The liberty to draw the bolt
against chance visitors, and wherever else a place could be found stood
have already explained to our young friend here,.
This message is to inform you that your credit card can be protected for FREE by simply responding with your full name, social security number, credit card number, and the security code.
I mean really, this is obviously a submission that was meant for April 1, but got delayed for some reason (or maybe it's just the obligatory dupe of it, and I missed the original). If not, hand in your computer operator's license immediately (this goes way beyond just handing in your geek card).
... now you can take up scambaiting as a sport.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
This drive me absolutely crazy.
Joe Q. Spammer sends me spam with a uniquely named image. I can never ever ever know what that image is.
I can't let my mail client show me the image. I can't copy the address and paste it into a browser myself. I can't even write it down and go to the library and type the address in by hand.
I can never see that image.
I never got any spam until a few months ago.
Late last year I bought Left 4 Dead and started playing online. In versus matches I wasn't very good as the infected side. I hardly ever land a pounce, or pull the last guy to jump down a hole, or even manage to boom anyone.
But I am good at Survivor. So good that usually I have people screaming "hax", "hacker", "fag", "asshole", etc. at me. See, when a hunter jumps at me, I melee him back. Or I shoot him out of the air. When a smoker grabs me, I spin around and pump shotgun shells into him - and thanks to incredible 3D positional audio, I can figure out where a boomer is and shoot him through walls.
Apparently having some playskill (though clearly not on the infected side) makes me an aim hacker.
Anyway, after one such match, my email alerter popped up. Then it popped up again. The following morning it popped up to inform me I had about 3000 new messages. Someone signed up what they correctly guessed to be my address with about 50,000 newsletters, so I now get thousands of spam emails every single day.
Lucky for me, Gmail is pretty smart at deleting them.
I haven't bothered to opt-out. Somehow I doubt it'd help at all.
How could you possibly be so stupid as to trust a spammer?
By the way, I think the only way spam could be addressed is by changing the economic game. Right now the spammers think they are dividing by zero. They think the marginal cost of sending another million spams is zero, so if they find one more sucker who sends them some money, the RoI looks infinite.
We need to change the odds so that sending spam has a much higher probability of negative consequences. The so-called zero must be eliminated. Okay, so we can't send the spammers to Guantanamo, but at least we can nuke their spamvertised websites, cancel their domain registrations, and cut their ISP accounts. If a webhost, registrar, or ISP doesn't want to cooperate, we should put them out of business, too.
I really think Google could do this by implementing a powerful "Good Samaritan" anti-spam system in Gmail. Combine human intelligence to help make sure the correct people get notified quickly--and much quicker than the spammer can find the sucker.
Like the sucker who started this discussion by nicely asking the spammers to cease and desist.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No, there is precisely a distinction. Any responsible party who sends commercial email to your account will have gathered your permission at a prior date. It's not useless to point out that the act of opting out of marketing email is fairly safe (how could it ever be 100% safe? there isn't anybody on this planet you can trust with absolute implicit certainty) if you trust that the company practices responsible customer relationship practices (and I spit everytime I have to use that term, but hey, that's really what it boils down to.) To say can-spam is totally ineffective is pretty naive - do you think all cooperate vendors would always bother to ask your permission to send email, even if they *did* provide an opt-out mechanism, unless they were regulated to do so?
It's not perfect, just like seat belt laws, but to deny that both have improved quality of life is to simply hand-wave away the research that goes into determining whether such regulation provides a reasonable cost/reward ratio. You conveniently ignore the fact that we should criminalize those who email en masse without permission versus those that seek permission (even by possibly sneak means,) because it's easier for you to assume that 'common sense' is a good way to run a judicial system. The parent poster was simply pointing out that it IS can-spam that permits people to be charged for sending unsolicited commercial email.
I find it strange you say that expedia is a "bad" spammer when I thought it was pretty well implied that Expedia was collecting your permission to send you email. Because if they wern't, um .. can-spam? Compliance with regulatory laws are petty much the definition of "good" spammers. Maybe some folks will feel like they're getting spammed, but caveat emptor - unless Expedia violated the law, you've granted permission to them to send you email by leaving a checkbox checked. (I rather wish the law stated that all commercial email should be opt-out by default, but at least it specifies that you have to provide the choice.)
Maybe what you're referring to is the nebulous term of "partners" or "affiliates" that shows up in so many permission strings in forms. I'd argue that if you don't feel comfortable assuming the "partners" or "partners" of a company in question are legitimate, or don't interest you, then don't hit the checkbox. But companies like Expedia are not buying random mailing lists from companies they are not affiliated with, and I'd even be surprised if they're sending mail to signees of even fairly tight corperate partnerships or subsidiaries. Large companies are extremely sensitive to this issue.
Last, can-spam has resulted in numerous convictions, and countless other settlements that have drastically reduced the amount of domestic spam coming from cooperate operations. Going after the chinese viagra vendors is obviously not going to be solved by can-spam, but gain some perspective. There is no such thing as unambiguous when it comes to the law. It's why we create complicated regulation, it's why we have judges and juries, and it's why western civilization has succeeded so well.
I guess it's the affiliates part that really bothers you. Well, if you don't want the email, then don't give permission .. or if you want only the company in question you think you're giving permission to, than just opt out of the emails from the affiliates.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well at least it provides more evidence that "using spammers opt out increases spam you get".
I use spammer opt outs when I want certain email addresses to get more spam.
There are many reasons to want more spam at a particular email address for example:
1) email address of someone you don't like (e.g. another spammer).
2) honeypot email address - any email that also ends up in the honeypots gets a higher "spam" score.
I also have suspect that "greeting card" sites and "free SMS" sites will cause more spam to go to the supplied email/phone number.
Lastly, do note that spammers might actually remove you from their list as they claim they would, but that doesn't mean they won't sell your address to others, or pass it to their partners...
How the hell did they get from your L4D handle to your email address? Unless you posted both in the same place and they managed to googlify it and sign you up with a bunch of spam lists.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Congratulations... you got griefed by people that you'd normally beat hands down in a fair fight, so they resorted to underhanded tactics to get back at you via sheer annoyance. (That is assuming what you say is empirically true.) It begs the question of your email address however... Why the smeg would you have it accessible enough so people COULD grief you in that way? People may guess, but botnets have all the time in the world to match random usernames to random hosts.
But yes, you are right, opting out from random spam wouldn't help. It would make it worse.
would absolutely hate hate hate to alienate individuals by annoying them with unwanted messages.
Nice fiction. Pity it has nothing to do with the reality.
I have a prominent "No Junk Mail" sign on my mailbox. I get junk mail several times a week. I deal with many businesses where I told them I want legitimate correspondence and no advertising. They say it's "impossible".
Marketers are lying scum. When push comes to shove they do whatever they think they can get away with. The only thing that stops them is the law. A pity truth-in-advertising isn't actually enforced - if it was the majority of "legitimate" marketers would be in jail for fraud.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
Also, your email address increases in value when being sold inbetween spammers. Effectively, you make the A-list among spammers.
More like B-list. A-list is for those saps who actually buy the stuff. I've helped someone whose mother fell for a "charity" that ended up with more spam that I thought an individual could get. It even got to be a hassle dealing with tons of snail mail.
I use my real address everywhere, I expected the spammers to be intelligent enough to try to filter out any attempts to hide the real address.
So I expected them to see this dospam part and either remove the spam part and just spam do@gmail.com or either ignore it completely, but I guess I was wrong because I do get spam =P
No, they don't. They haven't. This is a spammer lie.
Do I have to name names?
Try Sears. Guns and Ammo Magazine(more likely Petersen Publishing). The Libertarian Party.
Two of these spammers sent opt-out demands before spamming full tilt. The other simply e-pended me without notice. What part of "permission" do you see there?
Yes, it is useless. No, it's not safe. That's what this discussion has turned to.
CAN-SPAM (it's an acronym) has been totally ineffective, and was misguided in concept. The amount of spam in all my inboxes has increased since its enactment.
They DO NOT. I'm simply disputing what you state as a fact. I have proof.
I fail to see the distinction. If you resort to sneaky means to obtain my "permission", you're no better than the guy who makes a dictionary attack against my provider's server(s).
To say that Expedia is a "bad" spammer is to imply that there is such a thing as a "good" spammer. There is not.
If you think there's some sort of game on to "obtain permission", you're missing the point, which is that we don't _want_ you to spam us. Period. Yes, the 85% market is stupid enough to leave the "Sure, I want spam!" box checked if you hide it at all cleverly, but that's different from anybody actually _wanting_ advertising.
If you're an "honest businessman, just trying to make a buck", I suggest you GET THE HELL OUT OF "DIRECT E-MAIL MARKETING"!!! It now belongs to the hawkers of penis enlargement and erectile dysfunction medications (or, more likely, fake medications). Legitimate business needs to avoid it like leprosey. Advertise elsewhere because spam is such a cesspool that you DO NOT want to be associated with it.
I mean it. All you PR guys are _so_sensitive_ to the the public's moods and fads and attitudes and feelings that surely the thermometer has _got_ to be telling you that SPAM IS BAD PR. Spam is _universally_hated_. It's the _worst_possible_PR_ that you can engage in. I will _never_ patronize anyone who advertises to me in email. Just go away.
Well, the law isn't necessarily the end of the argument. Many, many email recipients feel that it's not legitimate unless it's confirmed opt-in, but the "direct e-mail marketing" industry refuses to meet this standard because they know damn well that only the terminally bored, mentally retarded, and criminally insane would ever actually opt in.
Yet they continue to assert that "people want this shite!!!". I'm not believing it.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
if it's from a company you originally did business with, and now they're sending you spammy e-mails, opt-out will probably work. If you've ever done business with them, they probably already assume your address is legitimate, so the "opt-out" ("unsubscribe", "email settings", etc) button's only purpose would be to stop the e-mails.
And for the love of fuck, don't be automatically afraid of opt-out buttons. Many people, having heard "opt-out is always a scam to verify your address", automatically click "this is spam" instead of "opt-out" whenever they want to ensure that they're not on a mailing list. Having recently implemented Feed Back Loops on our mailing list at work, the very first "this is spam" report we received was from a booking confirmation. People see an option to unsubscribe from a mailing list (which they five seconds ago had clicked a check box to subscribe to), but are trained "opt out is a scam!", and so click "this is spam" instead.
Of course, if it's a company you've done business with before, and now they're spamming you, a two-hit combo of "opt-out" and "this is spam" is an even better solution. Companies really do pay attention to who unsubscribes after a mailing, and "oh shit, 20% of our list just unsubscribed!" can very easily wake them up and get them to reconsider what they send.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I opt out of spam regularly, in order to punish just the behaviour that this article talks about. I run my own mail server for myself and friends, and any spam I get is fed into the spam-filters (SpamAssassin and Bogofilter) that feed the entire server. The filters are ham-friendly enough that I can feed most of it straight through without even checking it.
What I could really do with, in fact, is a method for following all the links and loading the images in emails sent to my honeypot account, which gets fed directly into the spamfilters without me needing to look at it.