Frequently Asked Questions relating to Spamhaus data

Often “spam unsubscribe” and “address services” pretend to be "anti-spam" site claiming to be able to remove your address from spammers' lists, for a fee. Spam 'Remove-You' Services are at best a scam and at worst a 'live address' confirmation system for the spammer. Some pretend to be affiliated with government consumer protection agencies or antispam organizations. None are, they are all scams designed to separate you from your money.

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. Also, no spammer would ever use a “global” or “unified remove list” because they do not believe that anyone would want to remove their list - their junk is different apparently!

Below is a list of known “spam unsubscribe” scams:

theremovelist.co.nz is run by a known ROKSO-listed spammer, Brendan Battles, AKA 'Image Marketing Group' and is a scam to collect email addresses of naive internet users.

opt-out-tech.com is a scam run by fraudsters. The scam charges $18.95 to pretend to "opt" naive internet users out of receiving spam.

nationaldonotemail.com is a scam to collect email addresses on the pretence of removing them from other spammers 'remove lists'. In fact nationaldonotemail.com is not interested in what the user doesn't want, only in getting the address.

UnsubscribeNow.org is a protection racket scam run by spammers, UnsubscribeNow.org attempts to fleece naive Internet users $21.95 by sending out large volumes of spam to advertize that by paying $21.95 you won't get more spam from the likes of UnsubscribeNow.org

Remove.org is a scam run by spammers. Remove.org paints itself in the US flag with plenty of references to "laws" to sucker the naive into parting with their money.

GlobalRemoval.com calling itself "THE DO NOT SPAM LIST" and pretending affiliation with various agencies, GlobalRemoval.com is a scam which tries to fleece naive users $5 per address to 'remove' them from spammers lists.

unsubscribenet.com is a scam run by spammers to collect your email address.

nationalantispamregistry.com is a scam run by spammers to fleece naive users $5 per address for doing nothing (pretends to "do something" to stop your spam).

DMA/ANA The Association of National Advertising Managers (AN acquired The (American) Data & Marketing Association ("The DMA") in 2018. They are not an anti-spam group but pro direct marketing. There mission is to advance the interests of junk email senders

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 - learn more here.

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 automatically by definition a firm sending spam. 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. Any DMA member that is using eMPS is using it because he is sending Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), 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).

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, 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 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 worldwide, do not confirm to the spammer that your address is real and working.

Never Opt-out of lists that 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.

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 reporting service to file spam complaints for you.)