Over the years, I have signed up for numerous newsletters, e-commerce websites marketing, notification aliases. The result of 10+ year of online activity is that I get a bunch of stuff in my Hotmail inbox that frankly, I don’t want any more but I did sign up and agree to receive it. The legitimate senders will allow me to unsubscribe from receiving these emails by including an “unsubscribe” link in the email.
The only “unsubscribe” link I trust is the one that Hotmail puts on the webpage.
If there is an “unsubscribe” link in the email body, I often will not trust it. Often spammers use this as a technique to verify that an actual user is looking at their email and they use this confirmation as a signal to send even more spam to the user’s account.
for example, I got the following spam email in my inbox.
If I hover over the “Click here to unsubscribe”, I see that it points to the following address:
I do not know where this leads to but if I click on the link, I see the following: I am not sure if I am unsubscribed or not at this point. There is no confirmation message about a successful unsubscribe. All I see a new window an I am at the homepage of this website.
I think I just told the spammer that “hey, I am a real user and you can keep sending spam to me” :(
There are three things I keep in mind while “Unsubscribing” from emails.
1. ONLY trust the Hotmail Unsubscribe link (first picture).
2. If Hotmail does not display the “Unsubscribe link”, I go directly to the website that sent me this email and find a way to unsubscribe from that website.
3. If I do not trust the website, I will block this website/domain through my hotmail block list and junk this message.
PS: The views on this blog are mine only and no one else'
