Should You Send "Removes" back to Spammers?

Home | Address "Remove" Service Scams | Definition of 'Spam'

Scams

Beware of "Global Remove" Scams

Beware of Email Scams

Do you keep clicking "remove" links in spams, sending back "remove me" requests to spammers, yet your spam volume only seems to be increasing? Here's why.

Most spammers send out anything from 1 million up to 100 million spams every day to address lists scraped from all over the Internet, harvested from sites and insecure mail servers, stolen from millions of computers using viruses to grab the contents of users' address books, bought from other spammers, from spam address list CDROMs, etc. Spammers do not know which of the millions of addresses on their lists are real, which are working or not, they're simply spraying adverts at every address they can find.

Then you send the spammer a "remove me" message. Now he knows your address is real. And that's not all he knows...

By sending back a 'remove me' opt-out request you are confirming to the spammer that your address is live, you are confirming that your ISP doesn't use spam filters, you are confirming that you actually open and read spams, and that you follow the spammer's instructions such as "click this to be removed". You are the perfect candidate for more spam.

A live address is a valuable address, spammers sell live addresses at a premium as "confirmed deliverable" addresses to yet more spammers. If you don't want your address to end up on endless spammers' lists, distributed on spam CDROMs to spammers worldwide, do not confirm to the spammer that your address is real and working.

Never Opt-out of lists you did not Opt-in to in the first place.

No ethical or responsible company will ever send you unsolicited bulk email. Anyone sending you unsolicited bulk email, no matter how legitimate it may look, is a spammer. Anyone subscribing your email address to a mailing list without your explicit verifiable consent, sending you unsolicited bulk mailings telling you that you must "opt-out" or they'll keep sending, is in breach of all recognized Internet Service Provider policies and in breach of the law in countries where spamming is banned (Europe, Australia, etc.).

Never reply to spammers. Instead, help yourself and others by filing a spam complaint with the spammer's ISP. (if you don't know how to trace the spammer's ISP, use the SpamCop spam-reporting service to file spam complaints for you.)