Quote:
Originally Posted by Mary F
I got it, too - and while it came without "warning," my thought was it's an attempt to be sure everyone who does want it can get it. Remember a couple weeks ago when there were several threads/complaints from folks whose daily newsletter had ceased?
Please, just unsubscribe if you're not interested. All will be well.
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The problem is that many spammers can appear to be from legitimate sites. And they do not respect the unsubscribe request but worse, they use your "unsubscribe" request to verify that you have a valid and in-use email address, which then can be added to a list of verified e-mail addresses and
sold for more money (or, amazingly enough... bitcoins).
Therefore, the general advice from IT experts is to NOT use the unsubscribe option when receiving unsolicited e-mail, and instead simply mark it as junk so that your-mail client software will deal with it.
Of course if you know the e-mail is from a trusted source (such as this forum), then the unsubscribe option is the best course of action. But verifying the source is beyond the technical ability of most people.
Therefore it is not good practice for a web site to subscribe someone to a e-mail newsletter unless that person has "opted-in." That is, unless they have announced that they are doing that IN ADVANCE and provided instructions to stop the messages.
I don't think that I am receiving these "unwanted" e-mails, and despite the advice from IT experts, I actually find that unsubscribing works more often than not, so I tend to take the chance of being added to a verified e-mail list by hitting unsubscribe when I do get on such a list.
But IMHO the best organizations will not send out unsolicited information at all but will instead make it easy to subscribe, and make it clear when you have done so and how you can opt-out.