What is Digg?33 Comments
- GreenSlabOfClay, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4How about this tip?:
Don't ever Unsubscribe from ANYTHING, unless you know you subscribed.
***** simple.
How does this ***** get on front page? - Slackwise, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually, if you use Gmail, you can avoid dodgy emails easily.
Just use yourgmailname+DODGYSITENAME @gmail.com to register/signup for things.
And then it will send it to yourgmailname @gmail.com. If you start to get spam sent to yourgmail+DODGYSITENAME @gmail.com, you know that DODGYSITENAME has sold your email address to spammers! Then you can either filter it right into /dev/null (trash, spam, whatever) or call them and bitch. :P - Brooks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2conehead is my hero
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Slackwise: Spammers are not stupid. It takes all of one regular expression to filter your +DODGYSITENAME out of your email address on the spammers lists. A simple s/+.*@/@/g and voila.
- sophiaperennis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Use a disposable email address when you sign up somewhere, that is connected to your primary email address. Yahoo provides such an option. You can setup multiple disposable email address through AddressGuard. As soon as you get spam on the disposable address, you simply delete it. This way, you don't have to ever give out your primary email address.
- Porsche944, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not a bad idea, I don't think it will really take off however. Who wants to check a website to see if it's safe to unsubscribe? I mean you already subscribed to the list. I'd rather take my chances and unsubscribe then check this site. They already have your email address at that point so any damage done has already been done. Who's to say they still don't sell your email address to ther companies once you unsubscribe?
I'll digg tho good article. - brian_hundt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Gotta love that author's pic. Reminds me of a conehead.
- Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Who the hell has the time to go through this crap? "Unsubscribing" does nothing more than validate your address for the spammers.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1riiiight-or just have 2 email addresses, one for your family and one for your newsletters and such. Obviously if u have to go to this extent your not very good at email management
- deesine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've found that the best way to deal with unwanted emails is to ignore them, and get an email client with some good filtering, like Thunderbird. With Outlook, I used to get ~150 spams/day. Now it's ~3/day.
- Juggalo420, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0like said above use multiple email accounts one for those trusted like family and friends and news letters you know are legit and one for everything else.
- Xopl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This really ought to be a digg link to lashback.com and we should be digging that. Instead of this article.
- da5id, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Too much work. Just get 2 Gmail accounts -- one for personal, 1 for dodgy. (Gmail does an bang-up of catching spam before it gets to you.) And tell your your idiot friends to take your name off group lists. I got a "nested" piece of crap about world peace or some such ***** and found out my e-mail address was visible to a couple of hundred perfect strangers. Morons.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is the trap i fell into when i first started using the internet. I used to receive SPAM email and unsubscribe from email. Later i notice the more i unsubscribed the more they came.
lesson learnt: just ignore SPAM and block them in the future. All email services have "report spam" or junk filter. USE IT - driverseven, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0will they guarantee it? if they did, I'd try it.
- ByteGuerilla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Unsubscribing isn't safe when you didn't subscribe in the first place :P ;)
- Napfisk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0First 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. - bigteebo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0My favorite unsubscription nightmares were Apple and eAristotle travelmole newswire.
I never signed up for the travelmole newswire newsletters, but I got them CONSTANTLY. Okay, I'll just visit the website, right? The website had ZERO email addresses to talk to anybody at.
As for apple's newsletter, I sent in several unsubscribe emails, by the book, and still got spammed. - digman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i subscribe to many sites but I use my gmail account for it, I never give out my primary e-mail address to anyone.
- gavgav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'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. - uncle_dad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Finally, something useful on Digg!
- emostar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0oh.. and use spam assassin with bayesian filters... it deletes almost 100% spam automatically without any false positives that i am aware of.
- twylight, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1how am i supposed to read this cause its not fawning after apple...i mean...shouldnt this be ilists and ispam?
- emostar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0www.spamgourmet.com
- halogen8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm having the same exact problem trying to unsubscribe from the Frys Outpost emails.
- Cyberdactyl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0
In this day and age, if you don't have a trash Yahoo email account for exactly that crap, you're an IT idiot and shouldn't be online in the first place. - macslut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It's simple:
1) Never unsubscribe an email address that the spam wasn't sent to. Many people have email accounts that forward or redirect to others. IF you unsubscribe only enter the one the sender has, otherwise you're giving the spammer the second email address as well.
2) On average, you *can* trust unsubscribe systems when the service actually has real contact info and a real running website. In other words, it makes sense to unsubscribe from a legitimate newsletter, it's a waste of time to unsubscribe from attack spam (Nigeria/Penis/Viagra crap).
3) Contrary to many articles I've seen, spammers don't use unsubscribe requests to "verify" addresses and then send more spam. I've spoken to many writers of these articles who made the mistake of testing this theory by unsubscribing virgin email addresses. Ya, see #1 above. They *gave* them an email address they didn't have before and the spammer now uses it.
It's not worth the work for attack spammers to verify addresses, often they don't even bother remove bounces. ___@yahoo.com may bounce today, but someone will have it tomorrow.
If a spammer wanted to waste their time getting a premium database built (why bother since the whole premise is that sending billions is cheap), then they would do a score based on 1) did the recipient act on the spam 2) did the recipient open the spam 3) did the spam get sent ok 4) did the spam bounce 5) did the recipient take hostile action upon receiving the spam.
Someone responding to the spam with an unsubscribe request would get a something greater than 4 depending upon how hostile their unsubscribe request was. - scottt106, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0www.spamgourmet.com
register a sub-email address that will forward to your main email address in the following fashion:
unique_id.#of_emails_to_receive.username@spamgourmet.com
this 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. - jjk5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Has anyone successfully unsubscribed from Fry's OutPost emails? I've done it multiple times and keep getting them.
- gavgav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That didn't come out right. the address was digg.com.myusername@xoxy.net
which is another domain that spamgourmet.com uses. This is equivalent to digg.com.myusername@spamgourmet.com - without using the word spam in the email address. - GlassUser, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1This looks sneakily like an ad for a site I've never heard of before . . .
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Really cool...
http://www.gfx.com
Check out the new & improved 
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