Facts about "Address Remove Services"

For-a-fee Address Remove Lists are operated by conmen. Any system that wants money in exchange for 'removing' your address from spammers' lists, is a scam, you should report it to your State Attorney General's office.

No legitimate marketing firm will ever operate a Remove List or use a 3rd party Remove List, because no legitimate marketing firm sends Unsolicited Bulk Email in the first place.

There are many hundreds of millions of email addresses on the Internet, none of whom want spam. A 'remove list' database that could hold that volume of addresses would take each spammer days to 'wash' their lists against it - and at the end each spammer's list would be practically empty. Can you imagine spammers doing this? Spammers add thousands of traded or harvested addresses to their lists every day and would therefore have to keep washing their lists every day against the "Global Remove List" to ensure previously-removed addresses have not simply been imported back on. Can you imagine spammers doing this?

No spammer would ever use a "global" or "unified remove list" because all spammers believe that people who remove themselves from other spammers lists would not have removed themselves from theirs, since all spammers believe the junk they send is different from the junk other spammers send.

The (American) Direct Marketing Association ("The DMA") is a pro-spam group, not an anti-spam group. The DMA's mission is to advance the interests of junk email senders. The DMA is an out-of-touch but well-funded association that lobbies against spam laws in the United States. The position of the DMA is that "spam is freedom of commercial speech", and that the rights of their members to send you spam override your rights to not have your private email mailbox filled with unwanted spam at your expense. The DMA therefore advocate Opt-out (spamming) instead of Opt-in (permission-based marketing).

The DMA's opt-out E-mail Preference Service (eMPS) is a sham to pretend to U.S. Congress that spammers can self-regulate themselves. It will not get you off any spammers lists so don't waste your time.

Spamhaus knows of no U.S. firm using the DMA's eMPS service that isn't automaticallly by definition a firm sending spam, since the sole reason for users to need to opt-out of bulk email advertising they did not opt-in to is because the sender is sending without consent, i.e: any DMA member that is using eMPS is using it because he is sending Unsolicited Bulk Email, i.e: Spam. The sending of UBE is against the terms of service of all Internet Service Providers, against the laws of Europe and Australia, and is grounds for listing the Sender on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL).

In the opinion above we stress "American DMA" because only the Amercian Direct Marketing Association supports and advocates spamming. Many other countries DMA organizations do not support the views of the American DMA and instead work with legislators and anti-spam groups to eradicate spam, not to further it. Spamhaus has only the highest praise for forward-thinking organizations such as the Australian DMA who were instrumental in lobbying in favor of Australia's very effective opt-in anti-spam law.