blocking signups
I’m only a couple hours into my day today and so far I’ve received three different emails from three completely different senders, each inviting me to go look at the same exciting erotic webcam site. Each email message came from what I think is a legitimate sender — the latest one, from some sort of online sushi-related website, which I think is owned by some sort of sushi restaurant or delivery service, probably based in France, given the domain name used. I don’t think this online maki maker intended to advertise an adult website, but I suspect that they have open text fields in their registration forms or forward-to-a-friend forms that some spammer is exploiting to send out the gross porn links. And when I, and everybody else, report the mail as spam, the deliverability damage lands squarely on the sushi seller’s domain and IP address. Which sucks.The fact that…
Verifying email addresses through methods akin to what we now think of as confirmed opt-in (COI) or (DOI) isn’t a new thing. Mailing list software Majordomo added support for verifying new signups way back in 1996. I don’t remember exactly when it became common to validate that opt-in via an email click, but I remember building email click tracking — sending out a unique indicator per subscriber and taking action or updating a status — for my own purposes way back in late 1997 as part of a spam filtering system I had built at the time. Then in 1998 I started a COI/DOI email list for my friend’s jazz club using custom code (not captured by the Internet Archive until 2001). So, it’s been done before.