Question:
I keep sending back "removes" to spammers, and keep adding my address to "Global spam remove" web sites, but my spam volume only seems to be wildly increasing. Why?
Answer:
Spam Remove Lists are at best a scam and at worst a 'live address' confirmation system for the spammer. Often Spam Remove Lists pretend to be "anti-spam" sites and claim to be able to remove your address from spammers' lists, for a fee of course. Some pretend to be affiliated with government consumer protection agencies or antispam organizations such as Spamhaus. None are, they are all scams designed to separate you from your money.
Facts about "Address Remove Services"
- Address Remove Lists are operated by spammers. From the moment they claim you "opted-in" all spammers operate using lies and deceit, therefore by nature all spammers are liars and con men.
- For-a-fee Address Remove Lists are operated by con men. 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 off ice.
- Most spammers send out anything up to 80 million spams every day, to address lists scraped from all over the net, obtained from other spammers, copied from spam CDROMs, etc. They don't know which addresses are real, which are working or not, until you send them back a "remove". Then they know your address works.
And that's not all they know:
By sending back a 'remove' you are confirming that your ISP doesn't use spam Block Lists or spam filters, you are confirming that you actually read spams and that you follow the spammer's instructions such as "click here to be removed". You're the perfect candidate for more spam. - No legitimate marketing firm will ever operate a Remove List or use a Remove List, because no legitimate marketing firm sends unsolicited bulk email in the first place.
- There are well over 600 million email users on the Internet, almost all of whom detest spam. A 'remove list' database that could hold that volume of addresses would take each spammer days to 'wash' their lists against it - and at the end each spammer's list would be almost empty. Can you imagine spammers doing this? Spammers add thousands of traded or harvested addresses to their lists every day and would therefore have to keep washing their lists every day against the "Global Remove List" to ensure previously-removed addresses have not simply been imported back on. Can you imagine spammers doing this?
- No spammer would ever use a "global" or "unified remove list" because all spammers believe that people who remove themselves from other spammers lists would not have removed themselves from theirs, since all spammers believe the junk they send is different from the junk other spammers send.
What you should do
If you don't want your address(es) to end up on yet more spammers' lists sold on spam CDROMs worldwide, don't confirm to the spammer that your address is real and working. Never remove yourself from any list you didn't ask to be put on in the first place, always use the better option: Help remove the spammer from the Internet (thereby also helping millions of other users like yourself).
Information provided by The SpamHaus Project.
Find out more at http://www.spamhaus.org/removelists.html.