6th June 2002

PEACEFIRE.ORG founder, Bennett Haselton, reminds us to use our common sense when it comes to junk e-mail: "In the course of gathering evidence against spammers in order to sue them, I tried something; since all mail sent to any Peacefire address gets forwarded to me (unless the address is pre-assigned to be forwarded to someone else), I use a different made-up address like 'brian27349' every time I want to test an 'unsubscribe' function. What I've found is that: (1) if the unsubscribe address is a throwaway address at Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com, then the address sometimes doesn't even turn out to exist; if it does, then messages to that address probably aren't even read anyway. (2) if the spam advertises a site at a top-level domain, and the 'From' address is an address in that domain, and the unsubscribe method is either a form within that domain or an e-mail address at that domain, then it's probably real. (3) only once did I actually end up getting more spam at a throwaway address that I had deliberately created just for the purpose of submitting it to the 'unsubscribe' process; that was when I was spammed by a notorious spam outfit called Bulk ISP (a Nevada corporation, but apparently with all their offices in California). The risks of following the 'unsubscribe' instructions are miniscule, but the benefits of following the instructions are usually even more miniscule, so it's still probably not a good idea."