>A lot of the spam that I see is HTML that has a "opt-out" link. I think
>that it is not a good idea to ever click on these types of links as the
>spammer could just use it to confirm that the recipient read the email
>and hence will get even more spam. What are others' opinions?
Interesting you should ask.
The best advice from people "in the know" has always been to never click
that "unsubscribe" link or E-mail back to the spammer, because it just
verifies that the E-mail really got somewhere and was read.
On the other hand, it's going to be a lot more work for a spammer to
process those unsubscribes when they can just send to their original list
again.
I actually tried testing this out, by creating a spamtrap with an address
that was only given out on those unsubscribe links. It's been given out to
a dozen or so unsubscribe links/addresses over the past few months, but not
a single spam has arrived at that address. So it doesn't look like
spammers actually look at the addresses. They *may* sometimes actually use
'em to remove the address from their list -- but given how much spam there
is, it likely wouldn't reduce the spam by even a full 1%.
-Scott
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