Maybe Hold Off Before Clicking That 'Unsubscribe' Button

As you sift through all of those unwanted spam emails in your inbox, you may be tempted to click on the "Unsubscribe" button that appears on many of them. It turns out that may be the worst thing you can do, with cybersecurity experts now warning that responding to such a message or link may actually invite more correspondence and lead to future threats, reports the Wall Street Journal. According to DNSFilter, 1 in 644 clicks on "unsubscribe" links ends up directing the email recipient to possibly malicious websites. Selecting "unsubscribe" also lets whoever's on the other end know "you're a real person who interacts with spam, [which] can make you a bigger target in the future," says Michael Bargury, co-founder of artificial-intelligence-agent security company Zenity.

Charles Henderson of security firm Coalfire says that nefarious players could start to build a file on you once they've got you responding, in the hopes of targeting you later on for extortion purposes. Some "unsubscribe" links can also take a more immediate, proactive approach, sending users to fake websites that can fool visitors into providing sensitive information or open the door for hackers to install malware on your computer. What experts suggest you should do instead:

• Click on the "list-unsubscribe" header hyperlinked buttons that many email services embed in email subject lines or headers, instead of clicking on "unsubscribe" links in the body of the email that will take you out of the email service provider's portal and into the murkiness of the general web.
• Instead of interacting, simply mark a message as spam once it comes in and be done with it, and set up filters to screen out particularly persistent emailers so that those messages will go right to spam.
• Set up an alternate email account that you can use strictly to sign up for deals, coupons, contests, etc., so that your regular email doesn't get bombarded.

Final word of warning: No matter what, don't enter your username or password for your email service provider—or for anywhere, for that matter—if you receive a prompt asking for those credentials while trying to unsubscribe from spam. (More spam stories.)