"Unsubscribe"

[Jim Hawkins]

I'd love to know how many advertiser's 'unsubscribe' prompts I've hit over the last few months. A few of them - very few! - have actually worked first time and without further ado.

Most of them however, either have no effect, or require you to jump through a variety of hoops before they deign to do what is expected.

Some of them even have the cheek to ask for your name and and address and email before they will proceed.

Another ploy is to tell you that they have unsubscribed you - only for you to discover that they have left you subscribed to some subsidiary company you probably didn't know existed.

Yet another ploy is to arrange that the company website "... is having technical difficulties or is no longer available.." (although apparently still perfectly capable of sending out the company's email advertisements).

I suggest we should be able to set a flag in our operating systems that, if set, prevented advertisers from downloading their bumpf.

Any one agree ?

Jim Hawkins

[Huge]

Worst of all is stinking Vodafone and their advertising texts.

I've sent "STOP" to their "please stop spamming me" number about

7 or 8 times now. Waste of good electrons.

[Martin Brown]

Just bounce anything you no longer want. Clicking on an "unsubscribe" button merely confirms to them that the email address is valid.

I use a distinct tagged email address for every vendor that way I can easily blacklist any that sell my email on. I was once seriously bitten in the great Swen fest of 2003 with 1GB/day of hostile binaries arriving to my public facing email address. After that I was a lot more careful who I gave my personal email address out to.

There are already plenty of ad blocking tools and settings for browsers that avoid the pitfalls of rendering everything in full no matter how hostile and malign it might be in the true Mickey$oft style.

Only up to a point.

[Adrian]

I know exactly. Zero.

Here's a clue : Very few marketing emails are sent by "the company website".

Or you could just take responsibility for using the tools that are already there.

Use adblock in your browser.

Turn HTML off in your mail client.

Flag spam as spam, so that your mail client's filters are trained.

Make sure you tick the "Don't sell to me" and DEFINITELY make sure you tick the "Don't let every bugger else sell to me" boxes on any registrations.

Make sure your PC's configured to be secure.

Don't fall for phishing messages and other similar scams.

[Artic]

Jim Hawkins scribbled...

Is that your real email addy on your post? Learn to use message filters on your email client and send unwanted s**te to the bin. Don't bother bouncing email, it only clogs up the system.

[news]

I have had just the opposite experience. Having been with demon for many years I am on dozens of e-mail lists each with a different address (ie [e-mail]). I am slowly in the process of extracting myself from Demon and each time I get an e-mail I scroll down to the bottom of the message and look for the "unsubscribe" button. So far (about 30 or 40 processed) they have all worked first time. Some send one final e-mail confirming the unsubscibe giving a link "In case you made a mistake".

[Lobster]

Martin Brown grunted in news:4vZsu.28211$ [e-mail]:

But to be fair, IME it works perfectly OK for legitimate companies who (eg) you've had dealings with online and are justified in having your email address. I absolutely agree with you as regards to genuine spam (penis-lengthening, Nigerian lottery winning, Russian mail-order bride stuff).

Actually, I'd love to know: is there a way for average end-users of email to apparently 'bounce' a specific, individual email such that it appears to the orginal sender that it never reached the recipient? I use several addresses at different levels of 'risk' for attracting spam, and I'm very pissed off that somehow my 'top-level' address has just started getting the occasional spam - that's the address which also goes to my smartphone, and therefore costs me money to download, especially overseas. I'm guessing someone's online email address book got hacked. : ( I'd love to get those bounced; at least it might stop my address being progagated as a 'working' one...

[Adrian]

Superficially, maybe, but if the recip can be arsed to look, then no, because a quick glance at the headers would always show the origin and trace.

B'sides, almost all spam is autogenerated by software which really doesn't care about bouncebacks - even if the reply-to doesn't go somewhere else entirely. Just flag it as spam, so your software knows to just bin it automagically in the future. No spam filtering can ever be more than an approximation without training.

[The Natural Philosopher]

aka shotgun marketing. Juts spray off a load of emails using whatever lists you have or contact fields you have and use a fake return address.

all they want you to do is click on a link.

Even if the site seems to be down, they can still be harvesting a 'valid email address' > Not hard to fake a '404 not found' with e.g. PHP

Especially if its a long link that contains an encrypted versions of the email address they sent the message to.

I've had up a few of these..often they have kibitzed on someone elses server and redirect you to their server from there. The redirects only stay up few hours before someone complains and they get zapped.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

I have about 600 email addresses that are either in use, or have once been is use (and a set of notes that tell me which ones were compromised when etc). If one gets compromised, I can change it and filter the dross that goes to the old variant quite easily. I learned the hard way, having been a Demon user since somewhere in the 1990s, before spam was a problem, and ended up with vast amounts of spam targeting my old Demon subdomain. When I abandoned Demon I decided to set things up a great deal more carefully.

These days I not only give different addresses (for me) to almost everyone, I also set them up with various combinations of xx.yyy.zzzz @ domain values and some of the filters I use look only at certain sections of the email addresses. The only disadvantage is that when someone casually asks me for me email address I have to say that "I don't know, I use lots, I'll have to let you know...".

[Lobster]

Adrian grunted in news:l920c7$f8v$2 @speranza.aioe.org:

But surely is it not the case that a valid email address is likely to attract more spam than one that doesn't work? It's well known that lists of gazillions of email addresses circulate amongst spammers for 'direct mail purposes', and I'm sure that at least some of them must strip out bounced addresses from their mailing lists if only to make then more marketable?

And yes I already use a highly well-trained spam filter (POPfile) which does a brilliant job on my PC, but doesn't stop the crap coming to my iphone which is my main issue as mentioned (unfortunately I don't have access to trainable server-based software, and have never looked into spam filtering on the phone as have never needed to before).

[Adrian]

Cost vs benefit.

If you're using a botnet to pump out s**te by the gazillion, it's quicker and "cheaper" to just send rather than worry about validation. B'sides, if you're the botnet owner and charging spammers by volume sent, it's more lucrative not to worry about validation...

[Jim Hawkins]

Outlook Express I do know about the blocked senders list.

How do I set one up ? And do I use a fake name rather than my own ? If so, how do I set that up ?

Understood.

Also understood

Jim Hawkins

>

[Nick Odell]

This could be famous last words but over a year ago I stopped munging my email address on usenet to see what happened and nothing did. I don't think that usenet is big and important enough any more for spammers to invest the time in harvesting over here.

This xkcd cartoon is over six years old and even then usenet was insignificant -

Nick

[Huge]

Quite. The "reply-to" address in my headers is a real one, but receives no more spam than than my "proper" email address.

[The Nomad]

Like!

Avpx

[Huge]

Thank you, but sadly I did not say it; it's a quote from Ken Macleod.