How can I unsubscribe from porn site email spam?

Thanks for your message. You are trusting the people who are sending your email way too much if you're clicking on the "unsubscribe" link and expecting that you'll actually be dropped from their list. In fact, you're going to end up getting more spam of a similar nature, not less.

Here's why...

Spammers have a general strategy of sending email to millions of addresses that they get in databases from companies that scrape the Web and various other sources to get massive, massive amounts of data. Problem is, they have no way of knowing which addresses actually go to humans as opposed to dead accounts, administrative mailboxes, programs, etc.

As a result, their standard strategy is to send mail to a big list and have software that automatically removes any address that bounces (e.g., refuses to accept the message) or can't be delivered (misspelled domain names, etc).

What's left are addresses that might be mailboxes that are monitored or not. How to differentiate? Wait to see if people respond (yup, that one's active) or click on the "unsubscribe" link (definitely active).

What you say in your response and the fact that you've clicked on an "unsubscribe" link is completely irrelevant to them. They don't care. In fact, it's their software that's tracking it all anyway. The end result is the same, though: you've just told the spammer that you're a live human being at the other end of that particular email address. Bingo!

Now they have something else that's potentially even more valuable than their lame porn or scam site: a list of active someone-reads-this-email mailing addresses. So they promptly go and sell that list to other spammers and make a few $$ on the side.

End result? By responding with a "take me off this list" message or clicking on "unsubscribe" on a spam message, you can dramatically increase the amount of spammy email you get, not decrease it.

Totally not good!

The only solution? Set up email filters -- or ask your ISP to set up email filters -- that block these messages from ever getting into your mailbox in the first place.

Me? About 85-90% of the mail I get is spam, but I have a number of sophisticated tools filtering it all before I ever see it, so I have a delightfully spam-free inbox even as my email address is in what seems to be just about every spam database in the world.

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