Am I Being Paranoid?

[tearinghair]

Just had a spam email from Quote me Live offering me health insurance. Intended to click on th 'click here' button to remove further emails, but discovered that they wish me to enter email address - OK - and then confirm it it by clicking on another link. Is this safe? Or should i just mark it as spam and ignore it?

[andy-hughes]

Mark it as spam and ignore it.

These phishing mails look for a 'live' response - and once they get one, you will never have a moments peace!

[ubasses]

If it were me I would hit the block button and then move it to spam. Always risky unsubscribing from something you never subscribed to in the first place. It confirms to them that they have hit on a genuine Email address.

[tearinghair]

OK, thanks. A few weeks ago I must have missed one of those 'tick here if you don't want to receive further offers from carefully-chosen companies' boxes, and was bombarded with emails at the rate of about 50 a day. In the end I did go down the 'remove' route, and all but a couple of them stopped within ten days. Didn't improve my temper though.

[Old_Geezer]

Never click the links on unsolicited e-mails.

[janbee]

delete delete delete...

[Buenchico]

Many spammers simply guess at email addresses. e.g. if they send spam to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc, there's a good chance that at least some of the messages will be delivered.

However what the spammers would really like is to have a list of email addresses which they know to be genuine. So the last thing that you would want to do is to add your own address to such a list. But that's what clicking 'Unsubscribe' (or similar) on a spam email actually does! i.e. it effectively sends back a message saying "Yes, I'm real. Please send me thousands and thousands more spam emails!"

Never, ever click 'Unsubscribe' on a spam email! It's just asking for trouble!!!

[tearinghair]

Oh bother, that is so frustrating. I knew perfectly well not to click on a link, but thought the Unsubscribe button didn't count - and the 50 emails a day was getting beyond a joke. And to be fair, almost all of them have stopped, whereas ignoring them for over a month had no effect at all.