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"Do email vacation messages spur more spam?"
06/30/2002 Entry
Glossary
Vacation message: an automated email message you set up to be sent to any email address from which you receive a note while you are away from your email (you don't really have to be away from it, but in reality that's usually when people set it up).
Spam: unsolicited junk email
(Minor note: I think it's funny that "vacation messages" came to be known as such given that they are likely used more often when people are out-of-town and away from their email for work and not for an actual vacation.)
I stopped using email vacation messages a few years ago. Although I think they are helpful, I realized that they may be contributing to spam problems. Do they? If you have any thoughts on this, I would be curious to have my hunch confirmed/dismissed.
We are often told that we should never reply to a spam message in order to request removal from a mailing list because by sending a note to any spammer we are simply confirming to the originator of the spam that ours is a valid email address. This will make our email address more valuable and will likely land it on more junk email lists. Okay, so I never respond to spam messages with a request removal. (The same goes to clicking on any URL (Web address) to request removal.)
Following this logic, I figured that vacation messages could be just as detrimental when it came to spam lists. If my vacation message will bounce back to any email address then it will do so to spamming addresses as well thereby validating my email address to them. Consequently, I don't use vacation messages anymore. It's a bummer, but I'd rather have people think that I am not getting back to them as quickly as they'd hoped than have my account overflowing with spam.
Currently, I mainly get two types of spam. One is from an Argentinian spam list (the .ar gives it away). Go figure. I have no idea how I landed on that one. But it's very consistent. Luckily, it's all in Spanish and since I don't speak Spanish and so do not correspond with anyone in Spanish, it's pretty easy to recognize and also to filter out. (THANK YOU to the automatic filter function in Pine4.44!) The second type is mainly spam that hits all of Princeton's system which is pretty rare but occurs once in a while. The only other way I have landed on lists is by having had my email address harvested from my Web pages. But many of those are eszter dot com's and they don't come to my princeton dot edu account so it's kept spam at a manageable level at least on my main account.
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