The Trickery of Spammers

There are two kinds of mass emails: valid ones from things you have subscribed for, and spam.

"Unsubscribe" links are very different from one to the other. In legitimate emails, the unsubscribe link is valid.

But remember that people sell email addresses to spammers. If they can get some response from a person, they know there is a person reads email at that address. For unsolicited email, the unsubscribe link really means "please sell my email address to spammers so I can be deluged with spam!" So unless you know the email is valid, delete it; never click any link in it at all. If you have a spam filter, mark it as spam first.

Best way to handle this is to just trash them if your spam filter doesn't catch it. Now the spammers know that you're a "live" email, that someone actually checks it.

In the future, if you're not sure it's a legit link, make sure you turn on your status bar at the bottom of your browser window. If your isn't on, you can probably go to something like "View>Status Bar." Since I don't know what you use, it might be slightly different.

Once your status bar is visible, when you mouse over (don't click it) any legit link, it will show you in the status bar where you're about to go if you click it. If it looks fishy, don't click it.

Hi Scot,

In response to this sort of treachery, I'm thinking a biblical approach may be necessary. You know - sending a lying spirit from the Lord to lull them into complacency while you drive a tent spike through their head - that sort of thing.

what server are you on, scot?

i saw something similar in my gmail spam folder. you know why? simply because gmail is the best in the world in catching spam. i've used it for four years, and can count the spam on my left hand.

and, furthermore, they have a feature now that prevents you from drunk-emailing. not that you ever would, but it's nice to know that they're looking out for you all the same...

Just as I was reading this I received an email address from my own email address with a dirty title. I started to worry that it was sent to everyone in my address book, but after some research I found out that it's a trick of spammers - they mask emails with the address of the recipient to beat spam filters.

Have you been selling our email address Scot? (joking).

I've been getting a similar "MSN Featured" email from numerous sources over the past few days -- all running through my school address. It's unusual that something like that would get through the Gmail spam filter -- let along numerous times. I finally just copied a phrase out of the email (there is some common wording) and set-up a filter in Gmail to send them all to trash. No problems since then.