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.
... 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.
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...
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