Why clicking on Unsubscribe in a spam email is usually a bad idea

We all hate spam email, yet nearly everyone gets it from time to time. Yet despite our shared resentment, we may want to think twice about clicking that unsubscribe link at the bottom. We explain why.

Many emails that hit your inbox each day promoting offers, services or products that you don’t want are certainly annoying. As such, if the email happens to include an unsubscribe link at the bottom, we can see why clicking it would certainly seem appealing.

However, in the famous cautionary words uttered by Admiral Ackbar, it’s a trap. Or at least, it could be.

So you get an email land in your inbox and its promoting some random service that you’re not interested in and you don’t recognise the sender. Classic spam email. At the bottom is a link claiming that if you don’t want to receive anymore emails you should click this link.

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You click the link thinking it will stop the emails but you forget one thing. Spammers don’t play by the rules of email marketing. After all, if they’re sending you spam email in the first place they probably don’t care all that much about the rules. In fact clicking the Unsubscribe link does only one thing – it tells the spammer that your email address is valid and being used.

This in turn will lead to more spam email. The spammer knows you’re checking the email address now. What’s more, it will help the spammer build a list of active email addresses which they can then subsequently sell on to more spammers.

Before you start believing that every “unsubscribe” link is out to get you, there are genuine instances where you can indeed safely unsubscribe from an email. For example if you get an email from a legitimate company you’ve just done business with but forgot to uncheck that pesky “can we send you marketing material?” checkbox. Or perhaps it was a legitimate mailing list you signed up for but no longer wish to receive. In these cases, such companies do offer a way out of receiving further emails, since no reputable company wants to be accused of being involved in spamming.

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But if you’ve never heard of the sender, and it’s not from a company you recognise? If that is the case you should be thinking twice before clicking the unsubscribe link. It could very well be a trap.

And in some worst scenario cases, the unsubscribe link could even be malicious, designed to direct to websites that try and trick a visitor into downloading harmful files. Or worse, even initiate “drive-by downloads” which exploit software vulnerabilities to automatically infect devices as soon as they visit a webpage.

If an email is spam, mark it as such using the tools provided by your email software provider. This prevents this email address landing in your inbox again, and most email providers will use this feedback to better help other email users.