Thursday 6 August 2009

UpDown With Spam

I have a few short days of children-in-childcare left before some FullTimeMumitude, which will be followed by The New Career and busy-busy-busyness, so I'm trying to clear the decks and remove all commitments.

One small part of this is to reduce the volume of spam that lands in my inbox, so I don't have to delete it every day. I've done this by disabling the email address that gets the scam / penis-enhancing / weightloss-product rubbish, and then wading through all the unsolicited "newsletters" from people who once sold me some widget or other and clicking "unsubscribe". This in itself is a bit of a revelation: Every single one of these emails had a tiny-print unsubscribe link hidden somewhere within them, and they have all promised faithfully to remove me from their mailing lists. Whether they do or not will become evident in the next few days, but if they act on their word... who knew it was so easy! I should have done it months ago. Except...

Now I have no emails. None at all.

I feel lonely.

5 comments:

Queenie said...

Here's a comment, then - hope that helps!

pierre l said...

Some nasty people claim that a lot of the unsubscribe things in SPAM are there to tell the spammers that they have a valid address.
But it should unsubscribe you from genuine newsletters you no longer want.
Good luck with "New Career".

Lisa Rullsenberg said...

Yes indeed, here's to a spamless inbox (but hope you DO get some nice emails and comments to sustain you). Hugs for the new career xx

Beleaguered Squirrel said...

Oh God Pierre, I did know that but you've got me worried now. I checked every unsubscribe link before clicking on it, to try and avoid getting caught out by any phishy stuff. And they were all from people I'd genuinely set up accounts with (I do a lot of online shopping), like bhs.co.uk, boots.com etc. But this morning I have a horrible feeling I've detected a surge in Stupid Spam to my shopping address. You know the kind of thing, people telling me I've won the lottery etc. Eek. Have I just made it worse? We'll see. My online shopping address was created as a throwaway thing in case anything like this happened - I don't use it for anything serious, but I've used it for so many things now that I'm not sure how wise it would be to ditch it.

And yes, comments do help. Thank you all!

pierre l said...

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was phishy stuff in the unsubscribe box; just that replying to the spam tells them it's a real address. I wouldn't classify boots.com as spam though.