Jul 25 2008
To Subscribe or Unsubscribe
So, you are getting lots of email spam, how to stop it?
I have heard stories of people think that they can unsubscribe to it all and just wanted to cover this subject in brief:
1) Emails You Subscribed To
If at some point you signed up for an email that you no longer want, it is perfectly safe to unsubscribe to this. At the top or bottom of the email will be a link for you to click on, go ahead and do this and you will be all good.
2) Junk You Didn’t Subscribe To
If you find you are getting emails that are totally random and have no connection to anything you subscribed or bought, unfortunately these are the ones you shouldn’t try to unsubscribe to.
For the most part someone got your email address by purchasing it from someone else or in some cases even guessed (see my earlier blog post on How Did the Spammer Get My Address?).
If they guessed it, when you respond in anyway, they now know they have a good email address they can sell to others. For the most part any response (even an unsubscribe) will just get you on more email spam lists.
3) Newsletters You Didn’t Subscribe To
In some cases you might get something that looks like a newsletter which looks pretty legit.
If somewhere at the top it says something like “You are getting this email for” and then such and such a reason, it is pretty safe to try and unsubscribe. You probably “accidentally” subscribed to it when you purchased something.
Go ahead and click the link to unsubscribe similar to #1 above.
Summary
Unfortunately rules are only followed by people who were already following the rules. The more criminal types aren’t going to follow the rules no matter what they are.
It is best to get a good spam filter (like ours, you didn’t expect me to not mention it, did you).
