Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam, article.
I've come to the same conclusion as David Pogue. Recently I decided to revive my old classic address. I put it on hiatus and heavy spam filtering (SpamArrest) years ago. But I figured some of the spam had died away and spam sieve would deal with the rest. And it works pretty well. But one thing I did notice is that a lot of otherwise respectable companies have taken advantage of "found" addresses, and send me promotion. But these usually have an Unsubscribe button at the end of the email, and it works.
I also found out at some point that from what I could glean, many more addresses are distributed wrongfully from when you sign up with some company or site, compared to those picked off web sites by robots. So for years I've been using a special "throw-away" gmail address for signing up for newsletters and companies which demand it to sell me something, but who I didn't care *that* much for, so that if the spam ever gets too much on that address, I can dump it.
But by the way, Gmail is genius at filtering spam, I get almost nothing to gmail addresses. I've heard it's 'cuz they are web-based, they can check links in the mails and see if they lead to known or reported spam or virus sites.
2 comments:
Personally, I use mailinator.com to generate disposable mail addresses. They even have alternate domain names for those sites that have blacklisted mailinator (and there's always slopsbox.com).
You want me to subscribe to enter? No problem! I'm Noneof Yourbiz, and my address is dropdead@mailnator.com. OH! I have to confirm the address? No problemo, just a quick hop to mailinator and I can read and reply to any mail recently sent to any address I could imagine.
P.S. Make sure you don't send anything private there!! =8^O
I use gmail since day one and very little spam gets through. The problem with gmail is that sometimes it becomes a bit overzealous and filters legitimate mail too.
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