Opting Out Increases Spam? 481
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?"
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
Validation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Opt out = valid email (Score:3, Insightful)
It has always been my understanding that hitting those opting out links only verifies that your email address is valid.
Thus increasing the amount of spam because a valid email address is worth so much more...
DUH? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
People still fall for this "opt-out" scam? Really?
I thought this was pretty well known and understood by now, especially by Slashdot types.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
A Contest? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are the editors in some kind of contest to put up the lamest "Ask Slashdot" story? If so, they can end it right now — Timothy has definitely won.
Or maybe not. Somebody might ask "why doesn't my computer work when it's not plugged in?"
front page? really? or any page? it's 2009! (Score:5, Insightful)
How on earth did this make any part of slashdot at all?
CANSPAM act (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's all take a moment of reverent silence in which we honor well crafted legislation.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
Spam vs. unwanted e-mail (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A better question (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't. In the majority of cases you'll just end up forwarding your spam to whoever was unlucky enough to be listed as the sender. Never bounce a message after the sender has disconnected.
Answers (Score:2, Insightful)
> Was I a fool for opting out?
Yes.
> Is my email address being harvested when I opt out?
Yes. That's what it's for.
> Has anybody had similar experience?
I'm certain of it. I suggest you drop that address, create another one somewhere else, and then don't do that again.
Only works for legal spam (Score:1, Insightful)
As a lot of people commented already, opting out from illegal spam (the bulk of it) is just validating your email. Hey, why would someone doing fraud and operating an illegal business would bother to provide a real opt-out mechanism? Because they are cool guys or what?
However, there's a small portion of spam which comes from European countries mainly, that is semi-legal, from telemarketing companies operating on behalf of legal companies. That is, they claim they got your email legally (accidentally otherwise), and provide you with a real opt-out mechanism (that's why make it legal and comply with the law on many countries)... in those cases, opt-out *might* work. In my experience, it has worked some times.
But is it worth it? I managed to opt-out successfully from some spammers... and what I achieved? I receive 5 spam emails less? That's nothing compared to all spam I receive, my Spam folder on GMail has an average of ~15000 emails.
If it is just aggressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DUH? (Score:3, Insightful)
large volumes of spam do cause network slowdowns, so, yes, we have all lost network bandwidth because of spam.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Spam vs. unwanted e-mail (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of empty distinction is why can-spam and other laws are completely ineffective - because legislators want to make a legal distinction between "good" spammers, like expedia, and "bad" spammers, like chinese viagra vendors.
There is no such distinction. If a user did not actively request commercial email from a specific commercial entity (not their affiliates or others they sell addresses to), then that email is unsolicited commercial email and should be an unambiguous criminal offense.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
It shows the spammers that there is a *gullible* human on the other end.
Re:No doubt I will be roasted but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually did this on my mothers computer. I looked at each spam message and made a call if I could trust the opt out, and I I went through her whole inbox. Result? Smap mail dropped from 100ish/day to less than 10 on average. And it stayed that way for near a year with a small trickle increase.
She probably signed herself up to a bunch of free-coupon ads from legit mass-marketing email farms, so now her only spam is evil spam. Bravo for using her email address as a guinea pig. She could have ended up with 500ish/day.
Resistance is futile (Score:4, Insightful)
The people that profit from spam, credit card companies, also are a powerful lobby group.
In short, spam isn't going away.
Your contribution eating congress critters will make sure of that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
I could be wrong, but I think the good news is that if they embed the graphics, they've basically embedded it such that your browser doesn't go back to a server to get the image (at some point, they added the ability to embed an image as base64 encoded data, theoretically targetting a page with small images that would take longer (due to having to setup multiple http connections after decoding the html) to pull down separately))...I'd say they're doing it more to get around filters than to do web bugs.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
zOMG w t f? This is evil, harvesting active email addresses for more spam when people opt-out! Who could have thought of such an evil plan? -incredulous-
Actually, there is one part of what I said above that's true...I am incredulous. How did this get a story on /.? Ooh, I have a story too: "Are spammers bad people that would misuse your information? wut doyoo guys think lol!!!"
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
First Amendment makes no such distinction, actually. It prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech, period. Certainly, limiting free speech to only certain "free speech areas" would qualify as "abridging" and thus be unconstitutional. I've already acknowledged, in my GP-posting, that the First Amendment does not force you to listen to someone else's speech, but banning all unsolicited business e-mails still seems wrong.
That's if you manage to overcome the (largely bogus) distinction between private and business — what if your friend signed up for Amway and wants to sign you up too? Will they be breaking your hypothetical law by inviting you to do so by e-mail?
I don't know, how to do such legislation correctly. But I can easily spot problems in other people's proposals...
And what if they stand on the public sidewalk and shout loudly enough for you to hear inside?
I will call the cops, even if they were silent — over trespassing (physical presence uninvited on my property). Spammers don't do that. To call spam "trespassing in your mailbox" (which, admit it, you were about to do) is far less legitimate, than, for example, call unauthorized MP3-download theft.
That's not illegal for anyone to do. Indeed, everyone one speaking to you does just that: force you to listen. What's your justification for banning businesses from doing so — by e-mail?
Re:Spam vs. unwanted e-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
SPAM is any unwanted marketing email. Thus, the daily Expedia email is SPAM.
Remember, I, as the recipient / customer, am 100% right due to the phrase "the customer is always right." No business can change the definition of SPAM to legitimize their aggressive marketing techniques.
For example: A hotel that I made a reservation with signed me up for their mailing list, even though I told the person over the phone that I did not want SPAM. Their emails were unwanted, thus they were SPAM and I would be 100% justified in clicking the SPAM button.
Marketing is important; it's also important that email marketers understand that flooding peoples' inboxes with unwanted email is SPAM, even if it comes from legitimate businesses. My email account is not your billboard.
Just in case you didn't notice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
"legitimate e-mail marketing"
Sorry, there is no such thing.
Re:Spam vs. unwanted e-mail (Score:4, Insightful)
But people often use the spam button to try to end e-mails that they requested in the first place. I work for a non-profit and do mostly member communications. People pay hundreds of dollars every year to join or renew their membership with us. And yet they sometimes mark an e-mail from us as spam. When we call them to follow up, they say they just weren't reading it.
I think some people have been conditioned (by discussions like this one) to treat the "spam" and "delete" buttons as the exact same thing, and to never ever use the opt-out link...even when they know they requested the e-mails in the first place.
Responsible e-mail marketing starts with a real opt-in. That's a big distinction between it and spam.
JFAG (Just Fucking Ask Google) (Score:3, Insightful)
Yay, look everybody, it's YET ANOTHER Ask Slashdot that should have been an Ask Google. Reminds me of the web site justfuckinggoogleit.com [slashdot.org]. Yes that's a real site, no it's not a trick. I like how it says on there "the popularity of this site just blows my mind" in their information page. Seriously guys, why does almost every Ask Slashdot have to be something obvious? Trying to "pick everyone's brain" makes sense when there can be multiple creative solutions, not when it's a yes/no question that five seconds with Google would answer definitively.
You can mod me flamebait or troll or whatever because you're a pantywaist and can't handle the sarcastic tone I used. But just try to actually disagree with me, I dare you. I'd like to see you try.
no shit (Score:3, Insightful)
you're just letting them know you're a live account.
i've been very happy with using sneakemail.com, an email anonymizer which makes it very convenient to create a new email address every time you register with any given site.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you change a new-born business' diapers? Do you celebrate it's birthday? Do you give it christmas presents? Do you ask it out on a date? How about polar bears - do they have free speech rights? Or what about houses? There is nothing in the bill of rights which restricts it to humans or even living things. Corporations are artificial, people are natural.
Your correspondent owns his own Corporation -- [is he] a business or a person?
Does he use corporation property to distribute his speech? Does he receive a salary by the corporation to say or do certain things? Does he sign with his company title, or otherwise indicate that he is speaking for the company? Then it's commercial speech. If he has established a corporation, he has established an independent legal entity. This entity separates his private property from company property and usually also company debts from private debts. It is treated in many ways as if it was another person. It is however not a human and does not have human rights.
Re:JFAG (Just Fucking Ask Google) (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that just say it all? You'd rather learn while being lonesome than by having a discussion with other people.
Not that I don't agree with you in this specific case, but there are a LOT of things you can learn on your own that I'd certainly never prefer to. There's a reason college classes have a professor, other students, discussion sessions, study groups, etc.
Re:JFAG (Just Fucking Ask Google) (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an old conundrum. I remember Cliff Stoll Waxing philosophic on issue at the end of The Site, back in the days when MSNBC was tech focused.
A discussion session is very different from "Ask Slashdot". When you ask the professor a question, the question is directed at a single person. It only takes a moment. When you post to "Ask Slashdot" or some such other forum of volunteers, millions of collective moments are burnt reading an obvious question with an obvious answer. Whereas if the inquirer, followed JFGI, his moment, and the enquirer's moment alone would have been burnt.
I'm all for using social methods for learning and insight. The problem is, message boards aren't social methods. It's ducking into a room filled with enthusiasts of a common theme, and shouting "HEY EVERYONE, IT IS WORTH YOUR TIME TO LOOK AT THIS: I lather and rinse, but how do I know whether or not I'm supposed to repeat???" Even without my hyperbole, why is this considered to be acceptable by some on the Internet, but an obvious faux pas in real life?
Arguably, it's even worse when the person answering the question didn't at first know (or care about) the answer, and found it out, by way of a rudimentary employment of JFGI, and then linked or copy-pasted the results. I do love the 'domyjobforme' tag.
Finally, If you attend lectures at some of the more competitive universities, who still have the Paper Chase type professors, just try and ask a "dumb" question. You still get a wonderfully condescending, "Well, if you had just studied the reading assignment for this week, you'd already know the answer to that question, and wouldn't be wasting the whole lecture hall's time right now."
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
probableEmailAddress = uniqueLookingUsernameOfAggravatingPlayer + "@gmail.com"