I have done the unsubscribe thing on behalf of people who have left the company I work for, and even for people who report spam that they probably asked for and are too lazy to opt-out of themselves.

Spam is so cheap to send, one paying customer covers the advertiser’s cost for millions of Emails. If we could just get everyone to ignore it, and not buy anything from the spammers, it really would go away. As soon as it is not profitable, it will cease to exist.

We need a public service campaign that starts out “Let’s face it, 100% of the stuff offered by spam-mail is utter CRAP. There is no miracle weight loss formula. No herbal remedy is going to make this part longer or that part fuller.â€? Advocate that people make a simple personal rule “If it was advertised in an [unasked-for] Email, don’t buy it.” Period. Ever. If it really does sound like a product you can’t live without or it’s a great deal, search for it on Yahoo [or Google]. If the maker is actually trying to sell the product, they’ll have a web presence [and you can buy it there, rather than in reply to the spam mail].

Spam exists because it works, simple as that. Some percentage of people “do” respond to spam offers, and that’s more than enough to keep the spammers in business.

When you get spammail, just delete it. Don’t reply to be “removed” from their list. (It doesn’t work.) Don’t send back a fake “bounce” or “bad addressâ€? message. (It only helps spammers make their mailings more cost efficient.) In fact don’t do anything: Just delete the Email, preferably unread. That— and only that— ensures that the spammer has just wasted a little money on you.

If enough people do this— if enough people force spammers to waste a little money— then the economics of spam will change, and it will no longer be lucrative. When spammers no longer can make easy money by spamming, they’ll stop and move on to the next scam.

Good spam filters can help you sort the spam for easy deletion. Good legislation can help apply pressure to the spammers where they live. But the ultimate solution to spam is to make it unprofitable.

Do your part to help drive the spammers out of business. Take the pledge: Never, ever, buy “anything” you see spamvertised!

I am the primary developer for LashBack and our system does exactly what this last post suggests.

Our product integrates with Outlook and Outlook Express and provides a safe alternative to the delete key that will actually reduce the amount of spam you receive. When someone receives a spam email message, they can click the LashBack button rather than the delete key. This sends the email to our servers where we collect all the data about the message and send out a unique probe email address to the unsubscribe mechanism and wait and listen. If we start getting email to this address, we know the party is abusing the request. We will then make sure all other reports containing the same unsubscribe link or advertised domains are not processed for unsubscribe. If we do not get email to the probe after a waiting period, we automatically process the unsubscribe request for the reported email. Thus getting the good of part of unsubscribe without getting the bad.

Because of the way the system works, our database is able to tell us what unsubscribe links are misused and what advertised domains are associated with these links. We have already met with the FTC in person and are working with them to provide data to them in a format that can be used for prosecution.

In case you are interested in seeing some of our data, you can visit http://www.lashback.com/abuse. We have a list of abused unsubscribe links here and the advertised domains associated with them.

Eric Castelli
LashBack LLC

unsuscribe when you never were suscribed in the first place…and with the spam rolls in, you could report them to the FTC.

Surely, most of us are intelligent enough to know REAL spam from e-mail received from vendors we’re no longer interested in, and can make our choices accordingly?

Getting our newsletters blacklisted because some users don’t “play by the rules” hurts our OTHER members more then it helps the lazy ones.