Discussion on Automatic Newsletters Subscriber | Userscripts.org

Archived Comments, replied by Tim McCormack @ Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:22:34 -0500

Tim McCormack — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:22:34 -0500

@Aquilax: Rudi Pittman is correct.

Bulk mailers fall into two categories:

Truly illegitimate spammers, who always spoof the From: address, sometimes using another victim's email, and
Misguided or skeevy businesses, with whom you have a tenuous (at best) business relationship.

Using this script on the former only harms other hapless netizens. Using this script on the latter does nothing to hurt the bulk-mailing business (since they most likely have a business-class spam-filter appliance), and probably hurts the random businesses whose newsletters you are requesting for the bulk-mailer. (Their mail gets incorrectly marked as spam.)

Do you see the issue? You are only perpetuating the problem.

What you can do is keep marking those original newsletters as spam, on the email provider side. For example, I make sure to mark such things as spam on GMail, not just in my email client. Because providers use collaborative spam-filters, pretty soon the newsletter will not reach anyone, and the business will end up on a blacklist. :-)

Archived Comments, replied by Aquilax @ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:33:57 -0600

Aquilax — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:33:57 -0600

I receive regulary news letters from mailing lists to which I have never subscribed and I asked many times to be removed without success. So I though that I could pay them back for their courtesy and so I wrote this little script. I know that this script has still some problems, above all it reconize some sending email forms as newsletter submission forms, but I though that if some one else uses it he can give me some good advice how to improve it.

Archived Comments, replied by Rudi Pittman @ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:43:46 -0600

Rudi Pittman — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:43:46 -0600

This does very little to hurt the spammers. They regularly use other people's email addresses as their FROM. I should know as I had to close an email account I had because I was regularly getting "bounced email" messages for emails I did NOT send.

Archived Comments, replied by Jesse Andrews @ Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:05:56 -0600

Jesse Andrews — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:05:56 -0600

The following is an archive of comments made before threaded discussions was implemented (November 16th, 2008)