Solve Spam & Unsubscribe Issues: Tips & Tricks

[DaveC426913]

I slipped up somewhere.
I have two emails, one public, one only for trusted friends.

My public one is rife with spam. That's OK. That's what it's for.

My private one has been virtually free - until a friend sent me an e-card, using my private email. I could have handled it better, but the upshot is that now I am being spammed on my private account.

My question is:
Is there a way to deal with the spam?
Does unsubscribing work? Or does that just cause them to sell my eddress to even more places?

My webhost has a blacklist option for its webmail, but I'm not sure if it actually prevents those emails from reaching my mail client (Thunderbird).

Thunderbird is thoughtful enough to label them with [SPAM], but does not junk them. I guess I need to set up a rule to run automatically (but that means I will never even see the false positives. And I do get false positives.)

 

[jedishrfu]

Depends on the site, some,are reputable and take you off the list. Others may do it too but have already sold your email elsewhere. Then there's the bad ones who realize they have a live one here.

Time to get a new friend and a new account.

 

[Borg]

I agree that there isn't much you can do other than set up aggressive filters. Even 'reputable' companies can be slow to remove your email address. I once had a discount card with Best Buy and they started spamming me with offers even though I was supposedly removed from their email list. I spoke with supervisors on the phone and even went to the stores to get them to stop. The closest explanation that I got was that they didn't consider those emails to be 'offers' but instead, they considered them to be informational (like if my account was compromised). Nothing worked until I finally canceled my account and insisted that they remove my email address from the account first.

 

[f95toli]

Unsubscribe SHOULD work if the e-mail is coming from a reputable company based in Europe/US. There are actually strict regulations governing how and to whom companies can send out e-mails. They will of course try to "trick" you to sign up to e-mail lists, but the regulations are nevertheless there and a company can -at least in theory- get into serious trouble (very large fines) if the unsubscribe button is not working (or -even worse- it is not even possible to unsubscribe).
The regulations are -from what I understand- very similar in most of the western world, although how strictly they are enforced does vary from country to country.

There are also various caveats. The regulations are different for "information" and "marketing". Companies are allowed to send out "necessary information" to a customer even if said customer have said no to marketing e-mails. The rules surrounding what is "information" and "marketing" are also not entirely clear.

(disclaimer: this is all second hand information; basically things I've learned throughout the years from my wife who works in e-coms)

 

[Borg]

Companies are allowed to send out "necessary information" to a customer even if said customer have said no to marketing e-mails. The rules surrounding what is "information" and "marketing" are also not entirely clear.

That was the problem with Best Buy. What they claimed to be 'necessary information' was information that they felt was necessary to inform me of credit card offers and sales. Their email opt-out was worthless.

 

[f95toli]

That was the problem with Best Buy. What they claimed to be 'necessary information' was information that they felt was necessary to inform me of credit card offers and sales. Their email opt-out was worthless.

I'm not sure what the regulations are like in the US, but in Europe (EU) that would now have been illegal (this is now part of a law that I think is called something like GDPR which was introduced in 2016).
My wife works for a bank and she frequently has do deal with people from their marketing team who insist that their e-mail is "information" when it is really just an offer of some sort (examples of real information from a bank would e.g. be an e-mail saying that terms and conditions for your account has changed). Not everyone understands the rules.

 

[rkolter]

Always unsubscribe.
The bad guys will sell your email address anyway.
The lazy guys will remove you, eventually.
The good guys will remove you promptly.

 

[jedishrfu]

The point of not unsubscribing is that your email is worth less to the spammer because they don't know if it's active or not.

 

[jedishrfu]

The origins of spam:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/09/how-the-word-spam-came-to-mean-junk-message/

 

[Borg]

Always unsubscribe.

This is bad advice. As jedishrfu noted, for the bad guys, you are confirming that the address is active. That is valuable information that they will take advantage of.

 

[f95toli]

This is bad advice. As jedishrfu noted, for the bad guys, you are confirming that the address is active. That is valuable information that they will take advantage of.

But again, if it is a reputable company (as opposed to just generic spam) unsubscribing should result in you being removed from their e-mail list.
Hence, use common sense.

 

[Borg]

But again, if it is a reputable company (as opposed to just generic spam) unsubscribing should result in you being removed from their e-mail list.
Hence, use common sense.

Yes, this is what I meant. If you trust the email after verifying its authenticity, then its reasonable to unsubscribe if you want. A disreputable company won't hesitate to use your information or worse, send you to a virus website when you click on their 'unsubscribe' link.

 

[rkolter]

The point of not unsubscribing is that your email is worth less to the spammer because they don't know if it's active or not.

I really gave it some thought before I responded initially. There are three reasons why I suggest unsubscribing:

1 - People who sell lists of email addresses could say "these accounts all tried to unsubscribe" but in a business that is inherently unethical, an unverifiable claim has no merit. They are far better off testing the accounts in bulk via their respective postmasters and getting rid of those that come back invalid - a very quick process that allows them to reliably state that "these accounts are all valid" - which will be validated by the people buying the lists.

2 - The people who sell email lists may not be the people spamming you, and not all spammers will bother to offer to let you unsubscribe. A lot of spam works by getting a response to the spam - they ignore the people who aren't interested and focus on the ones who are.

3 - A lot of legitimate companies do direct marketing via email - "legitimate" spam, if you will. These companies have a vested interest in not being labeled as spammers because their email might get flagged or their domain blacklisted. In addition, if you unsubscribe, they (if they're set up properly) won't send your phone data to their call centers or your address to their printer for adverts. I know there's an example above of Best Buy still spamming someone, but most companies can flag your data across all their marketing platforms. It saves them salary to a call center rep and money to their printers, for starters. It's just good business to pay attention and actually unsubscribe people who don't want their email.

In the end, once your email address has been harvested, it is going to be sold and resold so long as your postmaster doesn't say your account is invalid or blocked. Unsubscribing won't make your email address worth more to an unscrupulous seller selling to unscrupulous buyers. But it will (generally) stop emails from groups and companies that don't actually want to spam you.

 

[rkolter]

I guess I will add one more thing - it should be obvious but when I say "always unsubscribe", if you get an email telling you that you have won a lottery you never entered from a nation you cannot pronounce, and all you have to do is call them back on their international line to win twenty five million dollars... you are probably better off not asking to unsubscribe.

If you're me, you respond and goad them into as long an email conversation as possible to waste their time and resources.

 

[jack action]

1 - People who sell lists of email addresses could say "these accounts all tried to unsubscribe" but in a business that is inherently unethical, an unverifiable claim has no merit. They are far better off testing the accounts in bulk via their respective postmasters and getting rid of those that come back invalid - a very quick process that allows them to reliably state that "these accounts are all valid" - which will be validated by the people buying the lists.

What is checked by clicking "Unsubscribe" is not if the email is valid (there will be a notice sent back if it's not anyway), it is to verify who are naive enough to interact with spam. Those emails are worth more because there is a bigger chance you have someone who will fall for a scam. In such a case, be prepared to receive tons of spam because you will be a the top of the list.

 

[jedishrfu]

A good analogy here is the sports prediction story.

A guy sends out 1024 emails saying he can predict the outcome of a world series of 10 baseball games.

He sends 512 emails saying team A wins and 512 saying team B will win and says if you sign up for $1 I'll send you my predictions for the next game.

If team A wins then he sends his next game prediction to the ones who saw the team A winning prediction, 256 saying team A will win again and 256 saying team B will win this time with say $2 for predictions.

He keeps,doing this with smaller and smaller sets of emails and a subset of these folks have seen his winning proedictions and believe he's onto something so they buy the future predictions.

In the end, he makes a bunch of money with no one the wiser.

http://skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html

 

[Borg]

http://skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html

Are you sure that's spelled correctly? I'm skeptical.

 

[jedishrfu]

Apparently the skeptics live here at skeptic.com with their magazine so the other skeptic had to use the address above. Is nothing sacred on the web when even the skeptics can doubt each other?

 

[Borg]

I didn't get a response from your link which is why I started examining the URL. Count it up to skeptical examination of email links from spammers.

 

[jedishrfu]

Did it finally work? Maybe your network is blocking it?

Its the Skeptics Dictionary site as if they really need a dictionary.

 

[Borg]

Did it finally work? Maybe your network is blocking it?

No, it just times out for me. If it's blocked, I'll get a message saying it's blocked.

 

[Borg]

Ah, it might be a firewall problem. Adding www to the front gets the same IP address but resolves a little differently.
C:\>ping skepdic.com

Pinging skepdic.com [98.139.135.128] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 98.139.135.128:
Packets: Sent = 3, Received = 0, Lost = 3 (100% loss),
Control-C
^C
C:\>ping www.skepdic.com

Pinging sbsfe-p11.geo.mf0.yahoodns.net [98.139.135.128] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 98.139.135.128:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

 

[jedishrfu]

Try using your phone. The article is basically the scheme i described to scam folks by fake predictions.

 

[Borg]

Try using your phone.

I am one of those few people who don't have a cell phone.

 

[anorlunda]

I know a lot of people have reason to not like gmail, but gmail's spam filter is very effective.

Even though I have only one address that I've used for all purposes for more than 10 yeara, I only get a span in my inbox once or twice a month. Also, in 10 years I never once found a legitimate email in the spam folder.

My theory is that Google uses its overview of billions of messages to spot when large numbers of substantially similar mails are being sent. They can use that as a starting point for their spam filter. They can also use big data to note how many times real users clicked on the "Is spam" or "is not spam". For example, the risks forum newsletter. Google can see that many copies of that newsletter have been sent out, but they can also see that if the filter classifies it as spam, many users click on "is not spam" and thus the filter can learn to trust that sender.

 

[rkolter]

What is checked by clicking "Unsubscribe" is not if the email is valid (there will be a notice sent back if it's not anyway), it is to verify who are naive enough to interact with spam. Those emails are worth more because there is a bigger chance you have someone who will fall for a scam. In such a case, be prepared to receive tons of spam because you will be a the top of the list.

How much do you think it costs to send a spam email to 1000 email accounts? How much more does it cost to send the same spam email to 10,000 email accounts? 50,000? Assuming you are the kind of serious bozo that makes a living spamming people, it costs nothing more to send to 1000 accounts vs 100,000 accounts.

Someone who unsubscribes is saying there is a human behind that particular email address. But, if you email 10,000 email addressees, and 1000 bounce, the other 9000 didn't bounce. If 500 unsubscribe, that still means the other 8,500 accounts might have people who read your spam. Maybe it went into their spam box. Or maybe it just wasn't the right spam.

So if you're one of those particularly despicable humans, what do you do during your next spam run? Do you email the 500 or so who unsubscribed, or email all the accounts that didn't bounce (which would include those 500 or so who unsubscribed)? Maybe you change the spam - instead of a free vacation spam, it's an offer to sell you a book on cheating on your taxes spam. But I bet you still send it to all the potentially valid accounts, and not a small subset of them.

Finally, I dispute the general claim that if you reply to spam to unsubscribe, that this will flag you as a better candidate for more spam. That is not how the real world works. A disinterested person might still give the benefit of the doubt to spam that catches their eye. A person who actively dislikes spam enough to try to limit their exposure to it, is less likely to believe anything sold via spam even if it would otherwise interest them.

 

[rkolter]

A good analogy here is the sports prediction story.

A guy sends out 1024 emails saying he can predict the outcome of a world series of 10 baseball games.

He sends 512 emails saying team A wins and 512 saying team B will win and says if you sign up for $1 I'll send you my predictions for the next game.

If team A wins then he sends his next game prediction to the ones who saw the team A winning prediction, 256 saying team A will win again and 256 saying team B will win this time with say $2 for predictions.

I don't know this is a good analogy - it doesn't cover unsubscribing or the impression that email accounts monitored by people who unsubscribe to spam are good targets for more spam. I suggest this variation:

A guy sends predictions to 1000 email addresses - 500 team A will win, 500 team B will win, and asks for a buck if they want the next prediction.
Team A wins. 50 people send him a buck, and 100 people asked him to unsubscribe them.

Delighted that he's netted 50 unsuspecting rubes, he keeps farming them as long as he can. But what to do about these 100 email accounts that unsubscribed - clearly people are checking those accounts - so they must be valuable. He decides to put them into his next scam.

So he re-runs the scam, this time with 1000 email accounts that include the 100 "valuable" unsubscribed accounts. Again, 500 get emails saying team A will win, and 500 get emails saying team B will win, and he offers to give more predictions for a buck. Team A wins. But this time, only about 45 people send him a dollar, and he gets a whopping 190 people asking to unsubscribe.

Still thrilled, he starts farming these 45 unsuspecting people. But now he's confused. He hoped to get more responses to his scam, because after all, he stacked the email list with accounts he knows are monitored by people who read spam emails! He decides to try one more time.

He takes 810 more accounts, and adds the 190 unsubscribed. Surely this time he'll make the big haul. He sends out his predictions (500 Team A, 500 team B) and when Team B wins this time, he is stunned to only get 41 responses, and an unexpected 271 people asking to unsubscribe.

He farms the 41 unsuspecting rubes. But as he does so, he begins to have doubts about stacking his email list with unsubscribers based purely on the notion that someone is monitoring that account and reading the spam he sends. He realizes that not all accounts are equal - and that an account owned by someone who will take the time to ask to be unsubscribed is less likely to buy into his spam than an account he knows nothing about. By giving unsubscribers an unfair valuation, he has cost himself 14 unsuspecting rubes.

So, he decides to sell the 271 unsubscribed accounts. He posts them on a site he knows for scammers, offering to sell "271 Great accounts - REALLY Valuable! Guaranteed responses! Totally not people who always unsubscribe from spam!"

Sadly, other spammers already know what he learned the hard way, and the only offers he gets are from people who want to pay via bank transfer, and need his banking credentials to do it. Disgusted, he turns legit and becomes a used car salesman.

 

[jack action]

@rkolter :

So why do you think spammers include an "unsubscribe" link into their emails? Just for the fun of increasing the traffic on their web servers?

I'm not a professional scammer, but one thing I've learned: Just like magicians, it is very difficult to outsmart professional scammers ... because they're good at what they do and I'm not!

What is the best solution to ensure you won't get caught in their scams? NEVER engage with them. This is good for emails, phone calls, in person or any other way you can think of. If it smells funny, don't engage or end the discussion as fast as possible, because they are experts at luring people.

 

[OCR]

NEVER engage with them. This is good for emails, phone calls, in person or any other way you can think of. If it smells funny, don't engage or end the discussion as fast as possible, because they are experts at luring people.

... I hardly ever answer my phone anymore, unless I'm certain about the caller... that's what my answering application is for.

I told a friend one time, "just leave a message", if he called and nobody answered.
His response was... "No, I'm not talking to a damn machine!"

It kind of made me wonder if he knew what a telephone really was... lol

This is a pretty decent site to look at, once in a while...
http://800notes.com/forum/latest

 

[Borg]

This is a pretty decent site to look at, once in a while...
http://800notes.com/forum/latest

Great site for checking (not just 800) numbers. I use it very often to review unknown numbers that have called. My cable company displays caller id on the TV when we get a call. I wish that it would also display the 800 notes comments at the same time.

 

[rkolter]

@rkolter :

So why do you think spammers include an "unsubscribe" link into their emails? Just for the fun of increasing the traffic on their web servers?

I'm not a professional scammer, but one thing I've learned: Just like magicians, it is very difficult to outsmart professional scammers ... because they're good at what they do and I'm not!

What is the best solution to ensure you won't get caught in their scams? NEVER engage with them. This is good for emails, phone calls, in person or any other way you can think of. If it smells funny, don't engage or end the discussion as fast as possible, because they are experts at luring people.

Why does spam offer unsubscribe links?
1 - What do you consider to be spam? Not all email advertising is scam advertising, but for most people, all email advertising is spam. There are huge numbers of email advertisements that are sent by legitimate organizations or people, who have a vested interest in not being labelled a spammer and who will remove you if asked.

2 - Not all scammers or unscrupulous spammers add unsubscribe links. But nearly all non-spammers add unsubscribe links.

3 - When a scammer adds an unsubscribe link it may be to try to convince you that the email is a legitimate advertisement, since (see #2) legitimate email advertisements will nearly always contain an unsubscribe link.

This is a science forum - we have to be careful about accepting common wisdom just because it's common. The common wisdom that you should never unsubscribe has not been properly vetted. I have given you simple reasons to at least suspect the common wisdom may be wrong. I can say as the owner of a long-standing email account who has taken the time to unsubscribe from his spam, that when I do nothing, I get 200+ a day, and after making a concerted effort to unsubscribe I can get that down to 10 or less a day. It stays around that level until I give someone new access to my email address. That's easy to do, and I have to go on an unsubscribe spree every few months.

There are many good reasons to believe using unsubscribe links will generate far less new spam than it removes.

 

[Borg]

This is a science forum - we have to be careful about accepting common wisdom just because it's common. The common wisdom that you should never unsubscribe has not been properly vetted. I have given you simple reasons to at least suspect the common wisdom may be wrong.

Have you vetted your claims or taken courses in web security to back them up, or is this just your opinion?

 

[rkolter]

Clearly if you read, it's my opinion that you should unsubscribe. I offer facts to dispute the unsubstantiated claim that unsubscribing causes more spam, and my own first person experience.

Web security isn't really the best certification for speaking intelligently about spam. I have 25 professional years in IT, including working for legitimate companies who send email advertising, and am certified with Microsoft Exchange and have configured spam filtering. I do have my Security+ and CEH certifications, but I don't believe they apply?

 

[Borg]

I also have Security+ and am regularly tested at work with deviously authentic looking emails looking to see if we're dumb enough to click on any of the links in the email. Anyone who does, gets to redo their training. So, I don't understand why someone with Security+ certification would be advising people to click on unsubscribe links from spammers. You of all people should know how dangerous that is.

 

[rkolter]

The question I've been focusing on from the OP was:

Does unsubscribing work? Or does that just cause them to sell my eddress to even more places?

1 - A lot of what people consider to be spam is really unsolicited email from otherwise legitimate companies. They benefit from unsubscribing you and can face penalties for treating your email address as a marketable commodity. Any legitimate business, organization or individual who uses email advertising cares about their reputation and will make an effort (although some better than others) to unsubscribe you if requested.

2 - The actual spammers - people who mass email advertising or worse, the scammers who use email to entice people into scams, don't really benefit from you unsubscribing. They may offer the unsubscribe link because legitimate companies DO offer an unsubscribe link. But if you unsubscribe, that does not make your email more valuable to them. While it does show a person is reading the email, it also shows you don't give the benefit of the doubt to spam.

Unsubscribing will reduce the amount of spam you receive.

BUT TO BORG'S POINT -
I suggested you should always unsubscribe. That's a mistake on my part. The biggest risk in unsubscribing is not that your email will be resold or you will get more spam, but that the link itself will not do what you expect it to do. I always unsubscribe. But, I also take a lot of precautions that I can't take for granted everyone else reading this takes. If "Joe User" came up and asked me if they should unsubscribe or delete and I couldn't review the email first, I'd say delete. And that's probably the advice I should give here too.