safety of "unsubscribe" link in email.

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This is a question I always wanted to ask.
What when you receive some kind of spam email from a reasonably sounding organization and click the "unsubscribe" link. Could that be really a phishing fake email taking me to a rouge website that can compromise my PC and install a trojan or such?
The reason i ask, there were a few instances when i clicked "unsubscribe" at work and that took me a website with russian characters in it.
AV reports nothing, but if this is Russian/Chinese military grade stuff, i wouldn't expect commercial AV to detect it.
 
I worry too. Unless its something I subscribed to, those unwanted emails just get blacklisted ( using a mail option) to the spam folder; they will stop after a while.
 
I agree with Arco. If it's something I do legitimate business with or actually did subscribe to, I'd trust the link to unsubscribe. However, there is so much spam out there, and enough the tries to seem legitimate, those I avoid clicking on anything altogether.
 
That's why you set up a Gmail account. If anyone ask for your email that you personally don't know they get the gmail.com account. Gmail gets rid of the spam for you in thirty days and frankly who could give a .... what it is.

When you unsubscribe in most cases all you're doing is verifying they have a good email address and probably half of them never unsubscribe you.
 
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I unsubscribed from from someplace that had been sending me stuff 2-3 times a day. Now I am getting so much spam, I may have to change my email address. Major pain!
 
The answer is "depends."

Legitimate businesses, by all means, use the unsubscribe, it will save you, them, and your email provider time and money.

If it's slimey spam- nasty stuff- then "unsubscribe" really means "send me more spam." Just delete.

It's the stuff in between those two that's hard to judge. If you have no idea how they got your email, and they seem edgy, better to err on the side of caution and just delete (and block).
 
Originally Posted By: Nick1994
I click unsubscribe all the time, no issues. Works too.

But this is on my iPhone and iPad.


Same here. My iphone does a good job.
 
They can send you to any site so small potential of getting malware. However malware occuriring is so low as modern browsers corrected this.

My primary concern is they are phishing for email addresses in certain cases to see if real and person opens and deals with them. I presume the live body list is worth far more then a mass of email addresses that may be junk , ignored or do t work.
 
I haven't read all of the replies in this thread so please forgive any redundancies. The UNSUBSCRIBE link in **an unscrupulous** spam email will only serve to validate that the email address is working and that the emails are being read. That jacks up the price of the email address for the spammer to sell to other spammers.
 
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