How To Receive Less Spam Email

Spam is a pain, no one wants it, and we’d all like very much to get rid of it. Unfortunately for us, estimates reckon that of all the emails generated each day, as much as 45%-85% of them are spam.

The most benign cases are merely irritating and a waste of time, the worst are filled with malware and scams. As a threat to the productivity and safety of your business, the less time you have to spend wading through it the better off you’ll be.

Let’s look at how you can minimise the amount of spam clogging up your inbox.

Mark Spam Emails as Spam

The first step is by far the simplest, make sure to flag spam emails as spam.

When you mark an email as spam, it gets automatically moved to a separate location in your email client. There it can’t endanger you anymore, which is already a good enough reason to use the feature, but there’s more.

Every email that gets marked as spam helps to train your email provider’s in-built spam filter. Each new email becomes a piece of data it uses to discern the specific patterns that identify spam emails.

Every piece of data builds a clearer picture, and helps to stop more and more spam from reaching your inbox.

Don’t Open Spam

A lot of spam can be identified even before you open it. A sender you don’t recognise, an email address that’s a jumble of letters and numbers, subject lines promising prizes, etc.

If you do identify a spam email before you’ve opened it, leave it like that. Flag and delete it without opening it. Deleting emails unopened tells your email provider that the email is worthless, more training for the spam filter.

More importantly, if the sender is checking for interactions (and spammers often are) opening the email shows them that your account is active, there’s someone there to reach. This encourages them to send more spam, hoping that eventually they’ll convince you to fall for it.

Never open spam if you can avoid it.

Install a Third Party Spam Filter

If the spam filter that comes with all email providers isn’t doing a good enough job, you can add another one on top.

The major advantage of this is that a third party filter doesn’t replace the native filter, it supplements it. Spam emails then have to pass through two filters in a row, both of which looking for slightly different criteria, before it can get to your inbox.

This extra obstacle may be enough if you’re experiencing a particularly bad spam problem.

Protect Your Email Address

Prevention is better than cure, and while all the previously covered measures are important, it’s just as crucial that you avoid exposing yourself to spammers in the first place.

You can do this by being careful about who you hand out your email to. If it’s a business email, only share it with those you legitimately have business with. If it’s your personal email, still only hand it out to those you actually need to give it to.

Signing up for random online competitions is a common way to end up in a spammer’s address book, so resist the urge to sign up for that promised iphone. The less people you hand out your email address to, the harder it is for the spammers to get hold of it.

Spam email is a scourge we may never be entirely rid of, but there’s plenty that can be done to limit how bad it gets. Follow these simple steps and save yourself the time and hassle of dealing with this menace.