CAUCE - Join the Fight Against SPAM!
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

Credits

The original text for this page came from the http://www.cauce.org website. It has been formatted, revised, edited, and updated. It is printed here for convenience and posterity.

Non-Solutions

This page discusses some of the "solutions," mainly proposed by spammers, to the problem of spam. Each is listed with the reason(s) why it doesn't work.

Opt-Out

"Press Reply and Type Remove." Seems like every spam you get these days has that somewhere in it, doesn't it? Spammers claim that if you would just do this for them, then they won't send you any more ads! There's a lot of reasons why this doesn't work, but we'll cover the basics here:

Filtering

This solution is one that spammers really like. Filtering means to automatically delete messages based on things like origin or Subject line, etc. Why doesn't this work?

Delete It

"Just hit delete!" is something that quite a few spammers will tell you -- after all, it's just an email message, right? Not worth getting worked up over. What they don't tell you is that in order to deliver that message to you, other people paid for it. Why we know that "Just Delete" won't work:

Strike Back

Many people who receive UCE want to strike back at the senders in some fashion- this urge is magnified when the spam is particularly offensive or obnoxious. Simply put, attacking senders of UCE is not a good idea, for a number of reasons:



Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional