>or a bad outcome I ardently want to avoid (letting a spammer know my address is active).
Honest question- why does this really matter? Or at least matter to any degree where you would rather have more junk mail than potentially stop spam/undesired emails.
If a spammer sends out 1000 emails and gets 100 bouncebacks.. then they keep on sending to the other 900. You are one of those 900 and you click unsubscribe.. sure, they can detect that your email is active. But are they really going to stop sending to otherwise? It's not like people are constantly changing email addresses these days.. if I were a spammer and I had a valid list, I would basically assume that's a valid email if I don't get a bounceback.
So I just don't get how detecting that someone attempted to unusbscribe is that much of a 'tell'.
A number of years ago there was even a story about someone going undercover at a spamming operation and one key takeaway was that - at least at that place - the boss was very clear internally about actually removing people who tried to unsubscribe.
I cannot vouch for the story but it looked as legit as the average HN story back then so it might be true (or not).
I can believe that- otherwise why would you try to continue to scam/spam someone over email who is clearly trying to unsubscribe.. meaning they realize it's spam/scam.
The goal is to find people who don't know any better..
Honest question- why does this really matter? Or at least matter to any degree where you would rather have more junk mail than potentially stop spam/undesired emails.
If a spammer sends out 1000 emails and gets 100 bouncebacks.. then they keep on sending to the other 900. You are one of those 900 and you click unsubscribe.. sure, they can detect that your email is active. But are they really going to stop sending to otherwise? It's not like people are constantly changing email addresses these days.. if I were a spammer and I had a valid list, I would basically assume that's a valid email if I don't get a bounceback.
So I just don't get how detecting that someone attempted to unusbscribe is that much of a 'tell'.