This morning I read an interesting post on acetylene.net wherein he describes putting his Gmail account on the sacrificial alter of the spam demons by clicking the “unsubscribe” link in every spam he received. Surprisingly, this worked! From the numbers published, it looks like his spam harvest has dropped by about 97%. Quite an accomplishment, if it continues to hold.
But the article got me thinking–wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a list of ethical spammers, i.e. ones which provided “unsubscribe” links which actually did what they purport? I have in mind something like an inverse RBL, perhaps a “realtime white list” or something similar. I don’t know how such a system might work, or even if it’s possible. But wouldn’t it be cool if your spam filter could automagically follow Unsubscribe links if they appeared on the RWL?
