ma-il-khimp
pronounced “yiff”
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What’s a “Facebook vegan”? I understand Facebook virgin. But Facebook vegan?
I don’t use yiffs. I use yaypegs.
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About a million years ago, it was worth wondering if spammers cared about your email being verified somehow. That was then, this is now. You are already getting a ton of spam, right? How much more verifying do you think they need?
I don’t have the energy to click a lot of unsubscribes, but when my frail human brain notices a pattern I do try a few ad hoc. The first time I did it was on behalf of one of my users. I was shocked — seriously – when the first one I did (a real firehose) stopped almost immediately. I mean within a minute. It was one of those overzealous “legit” bulk mailers.
On my server, we also have to “extra tag” feature for uniquifying email addresses. It’s dandy. For example, after the Adobe breach, there was a huge uptick in those. We just configured individual target addresses to be refused at the gate and went back to watching television.
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Pronounced heeef, my heefs are in Spanish for some reason.
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Is it like facebook virgin, but with extra sanctimony?
(That’s the stereotype, not an actual dig at vegans.)
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LOL!
Better yet, they only unsubscribe from Faux Spam from Whole Foods.
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Some guy from the middle east tried to send me a haypeg, but I didn’t need that hkind of hcrap in my hinbox.
I use my own domain for email so tried a similar technique of having a catch-all mailbox and using [company]@domain.com when signing up to certain sites. It sort of worked but I ended up with thousands upon thousands of spam emails to completely random addresses so I had to turn off the catch-all in the end.
The worst thing is I would routinely get the same spam to a bunch of different legitimate addresses that I’d used for signing up to sites, one of which was my web hosting company. It seems highly unlikely they’d all have sold my address to spammers so something’s a bit leaky somewhere.
Anyway, as others have said there’s a distinction between spam from legitimate companies and the complete nonsense spam that barely even tries to sell you anything, and I’d never click an unsubscribe link on the latter.
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I was trying to figure out what it meant too. Maybe it’s someone who never socializes with anyone with a face, i.e. only socializes only online.
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There are different qualities of SPAM. Some are more like mass advertising and the return address is the actual address of the ‘advertising’ entity. Those you can unsubscribe from. Then there is the malignant SPAM. That one you can’t and actually probably even shouldn’t unsubscribe from because that might be registered like a confirmation that your email address is valid.
I have been doing this a lot recently, and one of the worst unsubscribe processes so far has been Dell, no one click unsubscribe. You have to manually enter your name and address and mailing address in case you want removed from that address. Submit then you’re warned that it may be some undefined period of time before you actually stop getting stuff from them.
The most painful unsubscribe though has been Ladbrokes, they have no unsubscribe process, I managed to find a link but it sent me to a server error page. The only way I managed to unsubscribe was reaching out to customer support on twitter for them to manually remove my email address (I’m sure making it that difficult breaks the spam/email laws in the EU).
Another annoyance is the mailing lists/sites that have no confirmation step to sign up. I have been added to several lists over last couple of years because someone misspelled their email address and put mine.
You need to look at the full mail, headers and all. What’s displayed to you may be different than the actual addressing.
I knew gmail ignored periods in addresses (happy.mutant@gmail is equivalent to happymutant@gmail), but I only recently discovered the plus sign trick. happy.mutant+chaseCCoffer@gmail also gets delivered and lets you follow the data sharing trail. Not that it reduces spam, but it might be…fun? It could also be trivially overcome by a spammer with any motivation.
That’s of no use. Professional spammers know how to blur the tracks in the mail headers. All you might learn is which provider they were first sent from but that’s mostly not very enlightening.
Which is precisely my point. In your last post, you mentioned “the return address is the actual address of the ‘advertising’ entity.” You can inspect the full message to get a feel for if this is true or not.
But all of this is neither here nor there. Unless you are investigating something or designing your own filter, it’s tedious and unnecessary to manually inspect spam because we have good spam filters now. Almost nobody cares about getting less email because we filter out the crap and most filters are pretty good at it, unless you are using one from 2002.
Our due diligence now is occasionally peruse our spam folder, unspam the few that were mistaken so the filter can learn. Delete the rest or ignore and let them expire. Manual inspection is unnecessary and a waste of your time. Unsubscribing from stuff that you know you subscribed to might be an ok time investment, but still probably not.
And nobody’s mentioned viewing images in spam. Much of spam has a callback-response attached to viewing images, which can verify your email address. That’s why most email programs go, hey, are you sure you want to view images? Because even viewing lets them know you’re on the other end receiving.
Let the machines do the work; be a good pokemon trainer and inspect your filters now and then to make sure they are on track…
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so it is
I assume you mean because you don’t have an account with PayPal? Because in the account settings, they have this:
(the only one you can’t unsubscribe from is Policy and Service Updates). I actually keep News and Promotions ticked, because they send out the occasional deal that actually interests me. The rest go in the bin. I get maybe 1 a week, in a busy week.
GMail also has a neato feature - if you mark something as spam and it has a legitimate unsubscribe, it asks if you want to unsubscribe as well.
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