Another interesting thing to note is that with an html most serious spammers have adopted a web server based analysis of their "exposure assessment". The simple act of viewing the email causes you to download one or more images from a web server they can see... They simply look at the web logs to know how many and in some cases which one's reached a target. It is our expectation these days that most opt-out email addresses are just for show unless the source is attempting to be legitimate.
_M | -----Original Message----- | From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of R. | Scott Perry | Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 3:10 PM | To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Spam "Opt-Out" ? | | | | >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 | --- | Declude: Anti-virus, Anti-spam and Anti-hijacking solutions for | IMail. http://www.declude.com | | --- | [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
