First, let’s get this out of the way: there is no way to completely eliminate or avoid spam— junk emails— in today’s world. Spam is the cost of doing business digitally, and if you have an email address, you will eventually get spam emails. You may only get a few, or you may experience a deluge, but some will find you! It’s unavoidable. The only way to completely avoid spam email is to not use or give your email address to anyone, including your dearest friends and family.
With that being said, there are some best practices to avoid getting more and more junk email. To understand how to avoid it, first you need to understand how you get these obnoxious missives in the first place.
What Is Spam?
I’m sure you’ve received emails advertising products and services that seem dubious at best, or downright fraudulent at worst. Common products being hawked include cheap prescription drugs, “male enhancement” pills, and dating services. Or, perhaps, you’re being told “Congratulations, You’ve Been Chosen…” for some special prize. Sometimes spam email masquerade as a company whose emails you may want to receive, but something about the message may seem “off”, or the email address it comes from may be a slightly altered version of the “official” email address. These are all Spam emails.
The marketing emails from legitimate businesses, some of which you signed up for, some of which you didn’t— aren’t considered spam.
How You Wind Up Getting Spam
As you’ve probably noticed, many online entities offer (or require!) the option to sign up for an account to utilize their services. They usually need you to use your email address to communicate with you and tie your account to you. Think about how many times you’ve signed up for newsletters or an account and given out your email address— it’s probably to many more businesses and organizations than you can think of off the top of your head!
If a business is part of a larger network of businesses shared by the same parent company, those other businesses may also have access to your email address and market to you using it. Some of these companies sell lists of their clients’ emails. This disclosure is often buried deep in the terms you agree to when you created that account. Other companies keep your information private, but may be the victims of a data breach where your contact information is leaked and made available to scammers and marketers. Many of you have had your email accounts, or have friends whose accounts, have been compromised; when this happens, the hackers gain access to all of your friends’ contact information.
How To Avoid Spam
So, you may have already intuited the main way to help minimize spam email: don’t give your email address to websites that you don’t need to. This doesn’t mean you should be afraid of doing business online or avoid buying things from stores you frequent, it just means you shouldn’t enter your email address into every sign-up you encounter.
Some people find that after holding the same email address for years and years, the amount of spam becomes too much to deal with, and they start a new email address. I have to admit, I did this periodically in my younger days. However, this is an imperfect approach. Your new email address will eventually fall prey to spammers, and you’ll have to be diligent about updating your contact information with every entity you want to stay in touch with; invariably, you’ll forget some, and things will fall through the cracks. Besides, current email providers (i.e. Sonic, Comcast, Google, etc.) have much better technology to help filter out spam. We do not recommend starting a new email address unless you find yourself in an extreme situation, but that is an option if things become unbearable.
How To Deal With Spam
We’ve established that seeing junk email in your inbox is unavoidable. What should you be doing with it when you see it?
The Mail app and most web mail (accessing email via a web browser) have the option to help train your email which messages are spam. In the Mail app on your computer, you do this by clicking the button of the trash bin with the X on it (if you hover over it with your mouse, it should say “Mark as Junk” or something along those lines). With many web mail sites, you can do the same thing by checking a box next to the individual email, and then you can choose from menu options at the top of the list of emails in your inbox to mark an email as spam or move it to a junk folder. Sometimes, you have to open the email to find this option. By consistently marking spam or junk as such, your email will become better at recognizing which emails it should automatically filter into that folder so you never see them in your inbox.
Some emails are unwanted, but not necessarily spam; this is an important distinction to make because if it’s not truly spam, you can deal with the email by unsubscribing. If a legitimate company gets ahold of your email address through legitimate channels (say, they purchased another business’ email list, or a sister company whose emails you signed up for shares your email address), once you open the email and scroll to the bottom of the message, there will be a small link that says “Unsubscribe”. By clicking that, you’ll be able to remove yourself from this company’s marketing list. Sometimes it takes a week or two for that change to go through, so you may see some more messages come through from them, but they’ll respect your desire to not hear from them again. It’s a good idea to consider unsubscribing from business’ emails that you may have once wanted to receive, but find yourself ignoring more and more, just so you don’t get overwhelmed by the number of emails you receive.
We know this is a lot of information to navigate, and depending on how you access your email, the things we are describing may look different for many of you. If you need help, call us today, and we’ll be happy to schedule you some time to work with John on learning what to do when you encounter spam email to keep it from taking over your inbox!
