Asked to Verify email when Unsubscribing from unsolicited e-mails

[WWGD]

TL;DR Summary

I'm offered the option to unsubscribe. When I accept it, I'm asked to provide my email. Is this standard/legit?

Ok, so, I guess like just everyone else, I receive a(n) (over)load of spam in my Yahoo/Gmail accounts. Some of the emails offer the option to unsubscribe.Yet when I accept it, I'm asked to provide my email. Is this standard/legit? I suspect these sites use a spambot and generates random addresses and they have no way of telling is these are legit. If I do send it to them, they know it's legit. I haven't been able to block the address. Ay ideas for unsubscribing or blocking, etc?

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Some of the emails offer the option to unsubscribe.Yet when I accept it, I'm asked to provide my email. Is this standard/legit?

The ones I have clicked on automatically have the email address. They often (optionally) ask the reason for unsubscribing, and that's it.

 

[berkeman]

Sounds suspicious. I would just go back and report the sender as spam and delete/block it. If it already has your e-mail address as @Wrichik Basu says, then it's probably safe to Unsubscribe.

 

[DrJohn]

They want to know which emails are live accounts, so the live ones can be used for more spam.
Why send 10,000,000 emails when 9,500,000 are dead or no longer used? Your response simply says use this live email in the next mass emailing, and with the smaller number being sent out, their costs are reduced.

The correct thing to do is NOT confirm you wish to unsubscribe your live email address from a list you didn't actually join. That action simply adds you to their live list.

And mark as spam, so any further emails go to the spam folder, and get recognised by the big email clients as ones to be dumped based on the souce they came from.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It might be necessary to remove the right address.
It might be an attempt to verify that "we have a live one".

How can you tell? Usually you can't

 

[anorlunda]

I like @DrJohn 's advice. Marking it as spam rather than unsubscribing is safer and achieves the same goal. Of course, that assumes that your email provider manages the spam for you.

 

[WWGD]

I'm thinking of returning them the email of other spammers, to get them on the mailing lists.

 

[DrJohn]

It might be necessary to remove the right address.
It might be an attempt to verify that "we have a live one".

How can you tell? Usually you can't

If you didn't subscribe to the list, haven't ever dealt with the company and especially if you don't recognise the company name, you get a very strong hint that they are collecting live addresses for future use. Or to sell on as verified to be live emails. Playing around on the internet I once came across someone selling sets of verified live email address - 10,000, 50,000, 250,000 of them at about one cent per 10 in the pack. I've seen a few screenshots in news articles about the dark web showing similar sets of email addresses for sale.

Yes, it might be a legitimate company that shares your details with a sister company and said so when you first subscribed. This usually results in regular emails from a known company and are more likely to honour your unsubscribe. But they usually code your email into the unsubscribe button, and it gets passed to their list as unsubscribe. So asking you to enter the email address is often the sign that it is collecting data.

One thing I also do is view ALL emails with images switched off, to avoid displaying the one pixel square tracking image that is coded to include the email address or activate a cookie. I only open images if I trust the sender or think I need to see what the image is. The tracking image does confirm the email address is live.

Even totally honest newsletters use a tracking image. I used to run a newsletter for a club, and at one committee meeting a committee member said he hadn't recieved an important email that required something to be checked before the meeting. I opened the newsletter admin section, and told him what day and time he opened it, and that he then opened it the following evening twice more to check something. Then he looked very embarassed at his feeble excuse for not doing some important work before the meeting. The one pixel image in the newsletter triggered the "email opened" feedback.

We were not spying on him, I used the tracking to work out who was no longer interested in receiving the weekly newsletter - we had a lot of Uni students in the club, and it helped me remove those who had left the uni, changed their email address (I'd check with the office if they were still a member) or were no longer interested in the club, while many others who had left the club still read the newsletter regularly several years after leaving. Clicking the unsubscribe in our case updated your database entry automatically. You didn't enter the email address.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I actually run my own mail server, and for a good while I was using unique addresses for everything. It was remarkable what would happen with a one-time address from a one-time purchase. Warranty registrations spread shockingly far.

But I agree with you - there certainly are clues as to the intentions of the unsubscribe page. Sometimes the clues give you a pretty good guess. Sometimes not so much.

 

[WWGD]

Just read about code called tracking urls. Will look into it , maybe I can find out where the emails are coming from.
Edit: Would be great if there was something similar for texting , where you can tell where a text originated.

 

[hmmm27]

Yahoo Mail often sent me spam/phishings with invalid/missing e-mail addresses because its algorithm thought my addy was similar enough (though it usually wasn't) that it might be for me.

So, maybe check the To: (or CC: or BCC: or whatever other) fields to see if you're the actual intended recipient.

 

[Rive]

I receive a(n) (over)load of spam in my Yahoo/Gmail accounts. Some of the emails offer the option to unsubscribe.Yet when I accept it, I'm asked to provide my email.

Instead of yours, provide the address of some support or feedback address related to the account.
Once upon a time it was our favourite practice to sign up for spam sources with the address of the IT support.
That was the fastest and most reliable way to get them filtered.
We have never dared to tell it to the support guys, though...

 

[harborsparrow]

In my experience, Gmail is extremely good at handling spam. Just mark it as Spam and let Google do whatever it does, and it won't bother you again.