Remove me!

[bemildred]

Do those unsubscribe links actually work, or are they just another spammer scam? A reporter goes undercover in the world of fake Rolexes to find the answer.

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Since September, Casper and his associates had been clogging my various e-mail accounts with ads for a watch shop called Royal-Replicas.com (formerly onlinereplicastore.com). I filed several complaints with the Chinese Internet service provider hosting the site, to no avail.

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Just look at the place. Royal-Replicas.com provides no physical mailing address in its junk e-mails or at the site. The domain's registration record lists someone in Spain as the owner. The site is hosted on a server in China, but the order page cites prices in Indian rupees as well as U.S. dollars. The headers of the spams reveal that many have been sent via "zombied" home computers. Even the headers of Casper's private e-mails are a fraud. (He routed all his messages to me through proxy computers in South Korea.)

Salon (You need a day pass)

[sandnsea]

1. unsubscribe, asolutely a scam

Figured that out years ago. Only very reputable companies will unsubscribe you without selling your email address to 5000 companies that didn't have it before. I HATE SPAM!!!

[welshTerrier2]

2. depends on the company ...

some honor "unsubscribes" and some sell you down the river to anyone who's willing to buy lists of email addresses ... the mailing list business is BIG BUCKS ...

i wrote an online newsletter distribution system at my last F**King company (just got laid off) and we absolutely honored unsubscribes ... i don't mind telling you i had something to do with that ... they really wanted to start selling names and spamming everyone ... i convinced them it would ultimately be really bad for business ...

the unsubscribe process took place immediately too ... you just login, uncheck the little box, and poof ... you would never hear from them again ...

in spite of this, my basic rule of thumb is: don't do it ... most email programs or ISP or whatever you're using have a mechanism to identify a sender's address as spam ... there are also additional email filters you can get that will store suspicious emails in a junk folder for you to review if you want to ... some of them can be trained and they get pretty good at weeding out the junk based on criteria you specify ...

[ConsAreLiars]

3. If you did not subscribe, Do Not Unsubscribe!

Spammers sell "validated" addresses. Use Thunderbird for email, mark this shit as junk, and make sure that displaying external images is disabled. (That is another technique used to validate your address.)

[bemildred]

4. I do like the junk mail controls, great stuff.

Your other comments are right on.

[Osamasux]

5. Only unsubscribe from a company you did business with

that then took the liberty of adding you to their junk mail list. They usually tell you that you 'asked to be on the list.' The same with trade shows, etc. If you don't know them, just add it to your spam list, then delete it.