SPAM WARS - can we defeat them?

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TechZilla Says: 

There is Hope!

I started getting tons of emails in my spam folder over the last few months. Normally I just delete them. I have Outlook set not to "preview" emails in that folder also. Lot's of what we consider spam is no more that a few words to a bunch of nonsense. But by looking a little closer, they may have 1pixel x 1pixel image that is literaly invisible and could be anywhere in the message. Even a period at an end of a sentence could be one of these.

While this may seem harmless, the purpose is to signal a server that your email address they have is valid and then the flood gates open.

Anyway, I decided to investigate where these email were coming from and I tracked it back to someone in China, a country notorious for the volume of spam that comes from there. I literally was getting no less than 10 emails for the exact same offer from 10+ email addresses at the same website. Each email identical....and then several other offers all delivered the same way.

Having nothing to lose I decided to break my rules.

I opened one of the emails and found the "unsubscribe" link. That took me to a webpage where I entered the email address. They stated it may take several days for my address to be removed. Believe it or not they actually honored it.  As a rule clicking on an unsubscribe link is  not only a waste of time but unadvisable. It's one way spammers get confirmation that the email address is valid. Also a list of currently valid email addresses alway brings a decent price the the right buyer.

My spam folder is hardly getting anything now.

 

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2 responses
I wonder how often that actually works though?
This doesn't hapen very often in my experience. It was totally a last ditch effort basically to test them. By all appearances it was actually considered legal by the way they included the unsubscribe info, so I gave3 it a try. It was so bad It took a min of 5 min just to scroll threough all the emails they were sending.