phpList & Spam

Spam, or unsolicited email, has unfortunately become a part of our everyday lives online. No one likes spam — especially the phplist community, it’s developers, users, and subscribers.

We understand that phplist could potentially be abused to deliver spam. phplist developers actively discourage this by developing phplist in such a way that it is inefficient for spammers. phplist has many features, and check points to make it inefficient for spammers, but more powerful for respectable uses.

phplist is licensed on the General Public License, which permits free download, and access to view and edit source code. Therefore, phplist.com can not be held responsible for customizations that result in the abuse of phplist.

If you think you have received spam from a phplist installation;

  1. First, try to recognize the content. Perhaps it’s a mailing list you signed up for some time ago, but forgot about.
  2. If you are certain that you did not subscribe for the message, then you should treat the message as spam; don’t ‘show images’ don’t click links, don’t reply, etc.
  3. Next, you can check it came from a phplist installation by looking in the message headers for ‘X-Mailer: PHPlist [version number]’
  4. Try to unsubscribe from the corresponding link in the email message
  5. If the link is not in the body of the email, look for a line ‘List-Unsubscribe: <http://some.website.url/?p=unsubscribe>‘ in the headers of the email. If you copy this link and paste it in your web browser, you will be removed from the phpList system system sending you spam.
  6. If the link has been removed and also is not in the header and you continue receiving messages from the same source, you might like to report spam to an organization like SpamCop.

Please do not report spam to phplist.com

SpamCop determines the origin of unwanted email and reports it to the relevant Internet service providers. By reporting spam, you have a positive impact on the problem.

Report spam to SpamCop. SpamCop will report to phplist ltd and phplist.com if action on our part is required.

Hints for a spam free inbox

Only use email applications with enforced security and privacy policies, and effective spam filters. From our experience, Mozilla Thunderbird meets these requirements. Many other popular and expensive home and office applications do not — despite manufacturer’s claims.

If you prefer webmail style Gmail, and Yahoo Mail meet the above requirements.