Yesterday, Laura Atkins wrote a blog post suggesting that unsubscribing from spam doesn’t lead to more spam.1 I know that this is a project that she’s been working on for at least a month, and I don’t have any reason to doubt her results.2
Interestingly, this morning, there was a new post by Brian Krebs3 suggesting that spammers do, in fact, trade opt-out information. He even includes an image file from a spammer forum that lists opt-outs and unsubscribers.
The purpose of offering this information isn’t likely to be to build lists of “HOT, ACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS” but to help spammers build lists of people who are complaining (or are likely to complain) about email. According to Brian, the last entry there mentions “abusers,” which is spammer-speak for what used to be called a “screamers list”. The irony runs thick with network abusers labeling the people who complain as abusers.
Brian and Laura aren’t actually in disagreement. Her experiment addresses whether unsubscribing causes more mail; his evidence addresses what spammers do with the data once they have it. Both can be true at once. It will only take one mistake (or one sale) for those suppression lists to become something other than suppression lists.
Footnotes
- Laura Atkins, Don’t Unsubscribe from Spam!!, Word to the Wise (Nov. 18, 2013), https://www.wordtothewise.com/2013/11/dont-unsubscribe-from-spam/. ↩︎
- See also: Ken Magill, Dear Anti-Spammer: Way to Make My Point, The Magill Report (Jan. 8, 2013) (archived Jan. 14, 2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20130114141210/http://www.magillreport.com/Dear-Anti-Spammer-Way-to-Make-My-Point/; David Pogue, Rethinking the ‘Never Unsubscribe’ Rule for Spam, N.Y. Times Pogue’s Posts (Sept. 1, 2011) (archived Sept. 29, 2011), https://web.archive.org/web/20110929140552/http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/rethinking-the-never-unsubscribe-rule-for-spam/; Michael Dayah, Spam Unsubscribe Links No Longer Considered Harmful, Lucent Vision (Mar. 4, 2009), https://lucent.vision/posts/spam-unsubscribe-not-harmful/. ↩︎
- Brian Krebs, Don’t Like Spam? Complain About It., Krebs on Security (Nov. 19, 2013), https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/11/dont-like-spam-complain-about-it/. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
