How To Properly...
Deal With Spam
Dealing with spam isn’t that hard if you understand it. As with anything, there is a proper way to handle spam, and an improper way.
I believe if you just hit ‘Report as Spam’ for every unwanted e-mail you get, you’re dealing with it improperly. These emailers aren’t supposed to be allowed to contact you unless you “opt in” to their mailings by supplying your e-mail address either directly to them, or to someone who doesn’t have a privacy policy that would prevent them from supplying your e-mail address to their partners. Email advertising is a pretty big business and it’s hard to avoid having your e-mail address spread to many advertising partners fairly quickly.
My point: if you opt-in to these mailings, even if you did it when you weren’t paying attention, it isn’t right to report them as spam. Instead, open the e-mail and look for a link which says something like ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘I no longer wish to be contacted.’ Email solicitations are required to have that link in some form, so if the email doesn’t have one… then I hit ‘Report As Spam.’
Sometimes when unsubscribing (opting out; opt-out) it takes a few days for you to stop receiving mailings… be patient, keep unsubscribing, and if you think you have a problem hitting ‘Report as Spam’ probably isn’t the most horrible idea.
Do you need a bigger solution, perhaps an automatic solution? There’s an anti-spam project called Blue Frog that lets users massively and automatically opt-out of a community list of email advertisers. The anti-spam project was attacked by spammers… and now they are starting a new, more powerful project called Okopipi. If you have a big spam problem you might be interested in their mass opt-out solution.
