How to deal with spam in your inbox

Most Internet users are probably already accustomed to spam as an inevitable noise background - like the noise of cars outside the window or a crush on the subway. It is unpleasant, but where to go. Unless to move to the village not to use mail. Mail providers' filters have learned well how to catch unwanted mail, and all that remains is to observe philosophically how the number is growing on the counter of letters in the Spam folder. But what to do, spam does not come from ordinary scavengers, but from seemingly decent Internet projects, shops and so on?

Spam button does not help

Once I registered for a couple of travel sites for research purposes, which have since begun to flood me with announcements of their "important" events and some other information.

The first reaction was to unsubscribe, good, the link was present (a decent resource!). But when you clicked, the authorization page opened and you were asked to enter a password, which I naturally did not remember. Of course, you can restore the password - but these are unnecessary actions and new emails to me, which I would like to protect from them.
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Many sites still do not know or prefer to ignore the golden rule of legal mailings - the ability to unsubscribe in one click. The requirement of authorization for this action is a regular manipulation for attendance cheating (“from a black sheep even a shred of wool”), and users do not like being manipulated.

Therefore, I chose the second step - began methodically sending their letters to spam in the hope that they would pay attention to the statistics of complaints and revise their policies. This partly worked - after some time, letters from these sites began to fall directly into spam, but then they began to come back to the Inbox. The administrators of these sites, apparently convinced the postal service in their decency. But the answer in one click did not appear.

Mailing through I do not want

There are other cases - for example, the service on the site of which you registered, but prudently turned off any notifications. I recently wrote about this in the blog "I resent" - a decent, like, startup, which I registered out of pure curiosity, and which I did not intend to receive notifications of, suddenly decided that if you really wanted, you could - and began to send me information about some of their promotions. Since it was absolutely useless to unsubscribe from such a newsletter (I did not subscribe to it), I asked Habr for advice. And Habr advised the following effective technique:

Complain hoster!

All sites have hosting, and hosting, as a rule, has an abuse-team, which, in fact, is designed to solve such problems as well.

The mechanism is very simple: you can determine the host of the beneficiary site using any of the many Whois services . Just enter the address of the site, and get information like:

inetnum: 89.108.125.0 - 89.108.125.255
netname: RU-DATALOGIKA
descr: Datalogika JSC
country: RU
admin-c: AN2353-RIPE
tech-c: AN2353-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: AGAVA-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

role: AGAVA NOC
address: AGAVA JSC

remarks: Routing and peering issues: noc@agava.com
remarks: SPAM and Network security issues: abuse@agava.com
remarks: Customer support: support@agava.com
remarks: - (took for example the data from the previous case)

After that, boldly send the received letter with the subject “Stop sending spam” to the abuse address. You can also take from the whois-data domain email of the one who registered the domain and put it in a copy. In the case of foreign hosts, you will need to send a letter in English, but in order for them to understand the situation and call the spammer to order, the simplest google translate message will come down.

This method is effective for dealing with both “spammers reluctantly” (those who did not think of making a convenient mechanism for unsubscribing from the mailing list), and with the real spammers - as a rule, they have quite a real customer who a small educational measure will not hurt.

We are against spam;)

PS On January 24, at Digital October, Moscow, Unisender will hold a seminar on e-mail marketing for companies: “E-mail , SMS and social networks - experiences of effective integration for increasing sales .” Register , and come - we give only useful tips.