11.02.05

Conventional Wisdom

Tagged as Spam

I got a Gmail account pretty soon after the service went live (and I’ve got 100 invites available if anyone needs one), but I mostly only use it for online sweepstakes, news site registrations, and other things that I suspect might result in “affiliate offers” — I do filter spam on my server, but I don’t want to make it work any harder than necessary. And it’s obviously been working — recently I noticed that there were over a thousand messages in my Gmail spam folder, and it’s set to delete anything more than a month old in that folder. Even for a dedicated spam-catching address, that’s a bit much for my taste. So I decided to try something a little unconventional: unsubscribe from the spammers’ distribution lists.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that you should never do this, because it only confirms to the spammers that your address is valid, causing them to send you even more spam than before. But what did I have to lose? Worst case scenario, I’d invite myself, sign up for a new account, and drop the old one. So I cleared everything out of that folder and for the next week I diligently clicked the “Unsubscribe” link on every spam message I received. It was a pretty significant time commitment, but incredibly, it worked. Spam is now trickling in at a rate of slightly less than one message per day. I’m still unsubscribing to those messages; with any luck, I’ll be able to bring it down to effectively zero.

Whether this is a result of recent anti-spam legislation, or whether I just happened to be getting spammed by the most ethical online marketers in the world, I don’t know. But it just might be that the conventional wisdom no longer applies in the war against spam.

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