itmanagement.earthweb.com — What if unsubscribing from an e-mail newsletter actually prompted the publisher to sell your e-mail address to spammers? This article describes an easy, free way to know in advance whether it's safe to unsubscribe from an e-mail list. It also reveals secrets of some innocent-looking unsubscribe forms that are not safe to use.
Feb 2, 2006 View in Crawl 4
napfiskFeb 2, 2006
First of all, I don't quite understand this. Why would you unsubscribe from a service that you don't know, in response to an email you didn't ask for?If I'm not mistaken, a European Decree has made the opt-in rule obligatory. You must tick the box stating you want email messages from company x. Everything else, sent to any email address that is not obviously a contact@ or info@, is strictly speaking spam and thus, theoretically, litigable.Belgium has its Robinsonlist. If you refuse any direct mail whatsoever from companies doing business in Belgium, register on this list. Of course, with spammers in dubious foreign locations, this has little effect. I don't know if similar incentives exist abroad.In practice, however, it is indeed far easier to use specially assigned e-mail addresses. I have several actually: my 'serious' personal home address, an IM address, one for boring stuff (official organizations, correspondence with government offices, etc.), one for tryouts, newsletters, etc. from companies I know, and one I never even check for when I don't trust the site (but then: why sign in in the first place?)OK digg in itself, but largely unuseful, I'm afraid.
brian_hundtFeb 2, 2006
Gotta love that author's pic. Reminds me of a conehead.
emostarFeb 2, 2006
www.spamgourmet.com
emostarFeb 2, 2006
oh.. and use spam assassin with bayesian filters... it deletes almost 100% spam automatically without any false positives that i am aware of.
scottt106Feb 3, 2006
www.spamgourmet.comregister a sub-email address that will forward to your main email address in the following fashion:unique_id.#of_emails_to_receive.username@spamgourmet.comthis way you can recieve the first couple emails sent to this address to confirm your account and whatnot, which are forwarded to your linked email address, and any subsequent emails to this address just get trashed. It's a nice system.
gavgavFeb 3, 2006
I've been using www.spamgourmet.com for years.I've got hundreds of email addresses in my list and have total control over each one.eg when I subscribed to digg, I used "digg.com.@xoxy.net".So easy to control spam from any website you have to subscribe to. I even use this when signing up for competitions in the local shopping center.
halogen8May 21, 2006
I'm having the same exact problem trying to unsubscribe from the Frys Outpost emails.