A few months ago I started getting emails from an unknown website, addressed to an unknown user at my domain.

I replied to them, helpfully pointing out that I had no idea who the sending company or the supposed recipient were. Naturally, I asked to be unsubscribed too.

Months later and I'm still getting these emails. The website responsible, www.pengeparty.com, seems to have no interest in sorting the matter out.

Clearly, www.pengeparty.com aren't very good at managing their mailing list.

But the bigger question is why do Buzzcast allow people to run unconfirmed mail lists that lead to these kind of problems?

Yes, there are unsubscribe links at the bottom of each mail. But this is the most common way that spammers use to confirm that their unsolicited messages are being read. So this is absolutely no use to someone like me that has been accidentally subscribed to a list by someone else.

I note that the Buzzcast forums make it necessary to confirm your address before completing subscription. Quite right too. Why not impose the same rules (for the same good reason) on Buzzcast customers? Running an unconfirmed list shouldn't be an option and only leads to administrative hassle and bad reputation.

The problem isn't a theoretical one. PengeParty and Buzzcast have wasted my time, and I'm fed up with it. I'm sure I'm not alone.

If you click on that link it will - I can confirm - remove you from the list. While a very reliable trick in unsolicited commercial email, not so here.

If you are getting unwanted emails to non-existent addresses on your domain you can bounce them and as the return-path on every mail that goes out is mailbot@buzzcast.com as long as some kind of 'unknown' or '5.0.1' / 'not here' wording comes along with it we will remove the bounce from the mail list in question.

Buzzcast users can import a list which does not, you are correct, request opt-in at that time - it does, however, require opt-in for those registering to the list either from a website link or from the buzzcast.com site.

Please let me know if you have other questions.

I'll take your word for it that the unsubscribe works, but the point is, how does the erroneously subscribed user tell the difference between your unsubscribes and anyone else's?

By any definition the mail I've been receiving is spam. I didn't request it, not ever, and I don't know who the senders are.

Perhaps your software should try to re-confirm all addresses on imported lists. This would make it useless to real, professional, unsolicited bulk mailers that have acquired a ton of addresses from somewhere, but not adversely upset legitimate users or their list members.

It sounds like you're locking the window while leaving the door wide open.

Hi,

As I noted in my response to your other post, if we can verify that someone is spamming, they are subject to removal from our service.

There is no way for the system to "double-verify" imported names, because that would necessitate our sending an email, which is the source of the problem in the first place.

Thanks for letting us know about your problem. We will take whatever action is appropriate.

Of course you can verify imported names. Just get the system to send out a standard confirmation email to the whole list but without allowing the list manager to edit the outgoing message.

On a legitimate list, this would be fine for all the list members. On a spam list, this would only allow the list manager to subsequently spam the addresses that opted in.

This is far preferable to the situation at the moment, where you can import a list and do what you like with it, including continuing to send mail to people like me that never asked for it in the first place. I'd rather get one confirmation email and then ignore it than an infinite number of messages.

Why try to retrospectively police your users' use of the system when it could prevent any of these misuses in the first place?

As for this specific situation, www.pengeparty.com might not be spamming the whole list in general, but they're definitely spamming me as they've sent me several emails since I asked them to stop - and I never subscribed to their list in the first place!

The simple answer is that when you get the first unsolicited email, you can simply click the unsubscribe link and you're done (off that list).

It's sad that because of abuse of "unsubscribe" links, some people don't trust them, but there's not much we can do about that.