Your inbox fills up. You know the feeling. Ten emails you never asked for, all before the coffee is cool. So you do the reasonable thing. You scroll to the bottom, find the little “unsubscribe” link, and click it. One less nuisance.
Most of the time, that is fine. But not always. And the times it is not fine are the ones worth knowing about.
You have already learned the big rule. Do not click links in emails from people you do not know. You have gotten good at it. A stranger sends you a link, and something in you says no. That is a good instinct.
Here is the odd part. The unsubscribe link is a link too. And for some reason, almost nobody treats it that way. It sits there looking helpful, so we click it without the same second thought.
On a real email – a newsletter you signed up for, a store you have bought from – unsubscribe does exactly what it says. No harm at all.
The trouble is with the junk. On a spam email from a sender you do not recognize, that unsubscribe link can do one of a few things, and none of them are good. It can quietly tell the sender that your address is live and that a real person is reading – which makes you more valuable to them, not less, and brings more mail, not less. It can send you to a fake page built to steal a password. Or it can start a download you never agreed to.
This is not just a hunch. The Federal Trade Commission warns against clicking links in emails you were not expecting, unsubscribe included. And a security firm, DNSFilter, measured it: about one in every 644 unsubscribe clicks led to a harmful website. That may sound like long odds. Then think about how many of those links you click in a year.
So what do you do with the junk instead? Do not click unsubscribe on it. Use the “mark as spam” or “junk” button your email already has. It moves the message out of your inbox, and it teaches your email to keep the next one out too. For a sender you actually know and trust, unsubscribe away. The rule is simple: if you did not sign up for it, do not unsubscribe from it. Just report it and move on.
It is a small change. But it is the kind of small change that keeps the bigger trouble away.
If this is your kind of thing, I write three times a week over at the newsletter.
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