Category — spam

Preventing Spam is a task that everyone who has an email account thinks of at one point or another. I recently clicked on the unsubscribe link in one of the many Viagra spam messages that I got to see if in fact it would help prevent spam…that sounds kind of gross…Viagra Spam, coming to a grocer near you…hahahaha.

But I digress, I clicked on the unsubscribe link to see where it would take me or if indeed there were some ethical spammers out there and it would prevent spam from that particular spammer from coming to my inbox…how silly, the words ethical and spammer have never been uttered together! It took me to their drug page where I could buy Viagra, Cialis and a few other boner pills, but nowhere did it mention anything about unsubscribing me from their spam list.

Here’s the deal, when you click on an unsubscribe link, all it does is tell the spammer that the email address is a valid one. What happens then is, they start sending out spam with your email address in the from field, so anyone who gets one of them will think it’s coming from you…kind of like a how an email virus sends out emails to everyone in your address book so they think it’s coming from you. Not only that, now they can add you to their valid email list and sell that spam list to other spammers, who then start sending you more spam and then if you click their unsubscribe link, the whole thing starts all over again.

You can add them to your blocked senders list or create rules in your email program so when these emails come in, they trigger the rules and get deleted hopefully…but most of the spammers have gotten smart and put any text that would trigger one of these spam rules, in an image along with pics of all the pills.


Any actual text in the body of the email is legitimate text, like the unsubscribe text in the example below:

"************TO UNSUBSCRIBE************
You are receiving this email at x...@emailaddress.com. We hope that you find these updates helpful, but if you would rather not receive them, click here. You will be immediately unsubscribed from our database."

The moral of the story, DO NOT CLICK THE UNSUBSCRIBE LINK, just delete the email and this will help prevent spam from hitting your inbox. It’s not going to fully prevent spam, but it will prevent it from getting worse.

Another way to prevent spam is to NEVER use your everyday email address when filling out ANYTHING online…this most definitely includes sending evites…you’re actually screwing all your friends by sending them evites. Because you’re adding their email addresses to Yahoo’s database or whichever evite site you’re using. Yahoo then in turn sells those email addresses and spammers find those evites online and harvest the email addresses within them.

Always use a throw away email address that you don’t care about or don’t check that often, like a Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN or any other of the myriad free email addresses out there. This is also why some sites don’t accept email addresses like that when you register on their site, because they know people use them for spamming purposes.

So good luck with preventing spam, I hope this will help a little.