How to Avoid Spam (Part 3 of 10) - Never reply to spam, even to request removal
Never reply to spam, even to request removal
Once you are on a spammer's mailing list, you will never get off. If you reply, even if they have a "remove" policy, they won't take you off their list. After all, they're spammers! Most spammers will use your reply to demonstrate that your address is live, and will sell the address to even more spammers. It's much cheaper to simply add more names to their existing list, spammers don't even bother to remove dead or duplicate email addresses. It's no more cost or effort to send a spam message to 10,000 addresses, 500 of which are dead. It's a lot of effort to maintain a current mailing list just for a couple of hundred addresses, I know, I've done it before (for legitimate purposes). Many spammers guess at email addresses, and by replying they'll know that they guessed correctly.
Ever get a blank email from yourself? An error message or bounce-back about an email you didn't send? That's a spammer using your good email address to send spam to other people. Now they think you're a spammer. I got a response from someone who asked me to remove their name from an email about herbal V1@gra. I sent him a nice note telling him not to respond to spammers. Spammers use other people's good addresses to fake out those ingnore lists. More than likely, your spammer has forged headers or provided fake return addresses (aliasing) in his email. My email addresses have been used to sell all kinds of stuff. The messages are full of dubious scams or even illegal claims. So, why should you trust anything else a spammer says?
Don't believe anything the spammer tells you about his offerings. Don't believe that he will remove you from his list if you ask. Don't believe that you voluntarily subscribed to receive his email just because he says you did. Don't believe the email addresses on spam. Even if you really know what you're doing, most of the time you'll trace the spam back to some zombie computer or some ISP in Russia that just doesn't care if their customers are spammers. The majority of spam is sent from computers that have been hijacked by Trojan horses or viruses.
Turn off image display in your email program, too. They can see when your email program downloads the image from their web site, and they'll tailor the image names so that they can tell who opens their emails and who doesn't. Guess which email addresses are worth more to spammers? The ones that people open and read. Outlook allows users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content, and so do most other email applications.
In fact, you should be able to recognize most spam before you even open it. The best way to deal with spam is to just delete it, unopened. Here's an article by spammers (or maybe legitimate email marketers) about how to write subject lines and sender's email addresses to increase the likelyhood of you opening the email and decrease the likelyhood of being blocked by a spam filter.
See tomorrow's posting for Part 4 of How to Avoid Spam.
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Once you are on a spammer's mailing list, you will never get off. If you reply, even if they have a "remove" policy, they won't take you off their list. After all, they're spammers! Most spammers will use your reply to demonstrate that your address is live, and will sell the address to even more spammers. It's much cheaper to simply add more names to their existing list, spammers don't even bother to remove dead or duplicate email addresses. It's no more cost or effort to send a spam message to 10,000 addresses, 500 of which are dead. It's a lot of effort to maintain a current mailing list just for a couple of hundred addresses, I know, I've done it before (for legitimate purposes). Many spammers guess at email addresses, and by replying they'll know that they guessed correctly.
Ever get a blank email from yourself? An error message or bounce-back about an email you didn't send? That's a spammer using your good email address to send spam to other people. Now they think you're a spammer. I got a response from someone who asked me to remove their name from an email about herbal V1@gra. I sent him a nice note telling him not to respond to spammers. Spammers use other people's good addresses to fake out those ingnore lists. More than likely, your spammer has forged headers or provided fake return addresses (aliasing) in his email. My email addresses have been used to sell all kinds of stuff. The messages are full of dubious scams or even illegal claims. So, why should you trust anything else a spammer says?
Don't believe anything the spammer tells you about his offerings. Don't believe that he will remove you from his list if you ask. Don't believe that you voluntarily subscribed to receive his email just because he says you did. Don't believe the email addresses on spam. Even if you really know what you're doing, most of the time you'll trace the spam back to some zombie computer or some ISP in Russia that just doesn't care if their customers are spammers. The majority of spam is sent from computers that have been hijacked by Trojan horses or viruses.
Turn off image display in your email program, too. They can see when your email program downloads the image from their web site, and they'll tailor the image names so that they can tell who opens their emails and who doesn't. Guess which email addresses are worth more to spammers? The ones that people open and read. Outlook allows users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content, and so do most other email applications.
In fact, you should be able to recognize most spam before you even open it. The best way to deal with spam is to just delete it, unopened. Here's an article by spammers (or maybe legitimate email marketers) about how to write subject lines and sender's email addresses to increase the likelyhood of you opening the email and decrease the likelyhood of being blocked by a spam filter.
See tomorrow's posting for Part 4 of How to Avoid Spam.
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