The number of unwanted spam emails pouring into your inbox can be discouraging, but there are steps you can take to fight spammers. The bright side is that they are pretty basic.
- Don’t post your email address publicly. Keep in mind that spam emails aren’t sent by individuals personally targeting you. They are churned out by automated programs that spew out millions of them a day, mostly at random. That’s why it’s so hard to stop them. These automated programs scan the internet looking email address on websites and in social media posts. Share you email address privately via messages.
- Create an email address that you use to enter contests or sign into websites. Reserve your personal email address for personal conrrespondence and important things like your banking, streaming accounts, and other things that may require immediate attention.
- Never click on links or respond to spam emails. When you interact in any way with obvious spam, you’ll just end up encouraging them to send more. Not to mention that any link in a spam email could be malicious.
- Mark spam email as spam. It may seem like a fruitless task to keep marking spam email as spam, but it does help teach your mail provider which types of mail are unwanted.
- Try not to think about that spam folder. Your spam folder may fill up with thousands and thousands of unwanted emails. Don’t let it worry you. That means your spam filters are doing a good job keeping spam away from you. As I said, spam isn’t personal, it’s all almost entirely automated.
This was well written, Cyn. Thanks for the information.
I have had only one email address in use for a good many years. (Plus a second, backup address that gets used maybe every other year for maintenance). Is it still useful for me to start another email address? I hardly ever do contests. I could maybe see using one for anything involving transactions…but I can’t see where that would reduce my (already minimal) spam. What do you think? Thanks again for all your help
John Anderson
“Try not to think about that spam folder.” WRONG – the rest of your advice is great, Cyn, but I try to keep my spam/junk folder empty. I check it at least daily, and delete it all. This has nothing to do with saving space, but everything to do with the fact that important emails DO end up there. If I never check that folder, I’d never know those emails were mistakenly sent to that folder. I can mark them “not junk” and move them to the inbox for action.