On Wednesday 13 August 2014 at 16:51:28 (EU time), David F. Skoll wrote: > On Wed, 13 Aug 2014 16:43:29 +0200 > > Antony Stone <antony.st...@spamassassin.open.source.it> wrote: > > - spammers who get unsubscribe responses will use that to confirm > > the address and send more, therefore unsubscribing to them is a bad > > idea > > I wonder how often this happens. This implies that spammers actually care > about the quality of their lists, which I don't think is true. It's so > cheap to use a botnet to blast out spam that I bet most spammers keep using > addresses forever and don't bother trying to validate them.
I think this goes back to the question "what is spam?" If you're talking about email promoting Viagra, Fake watches, Lottery wins, or Russian brides, then I completely agree with you. On the other hand, the mass-marketing newsletters which are selling dubious (but real) products and services are just as unwanted by the end users, but are probably trying to manage their own address lists at least slightly sensibly. I'm undecided about the Paypal / Bank / Amazon credit card number hoovering schemes - although by gut feeling is they put more effort into the comprmised websites than they do with the address lists, because if they get someone once, they've scored, they don't need to repeat to the same address. For the Nigerian 419 spam, the last thing you want to do is reply to it :) > > Therefore users should be encouraged to unsubscribe from things they > > really did subscribe to, but otherwise MTA rejection of what looks > > like spam should reduce the quantity of both spam mass-mailings and > > genuine newletters etc. > > That's true, but a lot of users (I've done it myself) forget that they've > subscribed to something, especially if it's really low-volume. Which is why we can't rely on them to unsubscribe, and need another way of stopping it coming in. Antony. -- "A person lives in the UK, but commutes to France daily for work. He belongs in the UK." - From UK Revenue & Customs notice 741, page 13, paragraph 3.5.1 - http://tinyurl.com/o7gnm4 Please reply to the list; please *don't* CC me.
