A nuke is a victory - score one for the good guys. Spam hunters often post to the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email. For learn more about these newsgroups, please see The Net Abuse FAQ . An opt-in mailing list is the one most people encounter on the list. You sign up, then start receiving mail from the list because you asked for it.
Some spam claims to be opt-in, but it never is.
Opt out is like getting subscribed to a new CD club every day, unannounced, then having to take the time to unsubscribe to every one so that you do not get billed for CDs you did not order. Basically, it's a means to persuade ISPs to change their systems to make them less easy to abuse by spammers. Robot, spider, webcrawler A robot, also knwon as a spider, crawler, or webcrawler, is a program that traverses the World Wide Web, and gathers information. Robots were originally used to gather information for search engines. Spambots have taken the traditional, harmless ideas of robots and warped into something else.