Beware of Malicious Unsubscribe Links
In addition to the deluge of spam texts you receive daily, your inbox is probably filled with newsletters, promotions, and other messages you don’t want to read and may not know why you’re receiving them. But you shouldn’t just click on unsubscribe links that could expose you to certain cybersecurity risks.
Email unsubscribe links may be malicious
While email unsubscribe links may seem harmless, especially if you generally trust the sender, security experts say there are a number of ways attackers can use these links for malicious purposes. Like replying to a spam message or answering a spam call, clicking “unsubscribe” confirms that your email address is active, giving cybercriminals an incentive to continue to target you.
In some cases, unsubscribe links can be hijacked to redirect users to phishing sites where you are asked to enter your credentials to complete the process. According to the folks at DNSFilter, one in every 644 clicks on email unsubscribe links could lead you to a malicious site. While some legitimate cases require you to confirm your email address, you should not enter a password, which is most likely a scam.
Bottom line: If you don’t trust the sender, you definitely shouldn’t trust any links contained in the email.
How to Safely Unsubscribe from Newsletters
Even if unsubscribe links are safe , it can be tedious to go through a multi-step process of clicking on individual emails and opening new browser windows to confirm. To minimize the hassle and avoid the risk of malicious links in individual emails, you can use your email client’s built-in unsubscribe features, which are less likely to be compromised by attackers because they are not tied to the email itself.
In Gmail, click More > Manage Subscriptions in the left navigation bar ( Menu > Manage Subscriptions on mobile) and scroll to the sender. Click Unsubscribe to the right of the number of recently sent emails. You can also unsubscribe from individual emails by opening the message and clicking Unsubscribe next to the sender’s name. In some cases, you may be redirected to the sender’s website to complete the process. (Note that Gmail may not consider all email campaigns eligible for one-click unsubscribe.) You can also mark the message as spam or block the sender.
In Outlook, go to Settings > Mail > Subscriptions > Your Current Subscriptions and select Unsubscribe , then click OK . Alternatively, you can block the sender by clicking the three dots and selecting Block > OK .
Alternatively, you can filter unwanted emails into another folder (including spam), so that while you’ll still receive them, they won’t clog up your main inbox. In Gmail , open a message, then click More > Filter messages like this to customize the filtering criteria, whether that’s sending to another folder, deleting, or marking as spam. You can create similar rules in Outlook by right-clicking a message in the message list and choosing Rules > New Rule .
The final option is to use a disposable email alias to sign up for newsletters and promotional emails or when registering accounts, which allows you to easily filter messages or delete the address entirely without affecting your main inbox.