You can’t, but you can manage it.
Assuming that you mean you get 300 spam emails a day, I agree that’s a fair amount. Between all my various email accounts, I suspect that I probably get around that many.
The question is not how to stop spam. There’s no way for you or me to stop spam. The better question is how to deal with it so it’s a minor annoyance rather than an overwhelming chore. And of course, how to avoid or at least minimize it in the first place.
Sadly, as I update this article 12 years after its initial publication, very little has changed.
Mark as spam and move on
You can’t stop spam, but you can tame it. Don’t try to block or unsubscribe, because that backfires. Instead, let your spam filter do the work. Mark spam as spam, and over time, your inbox will get cleaner.
You can’t stop spam1
The bottom line is that anyone who has your email address can send you email. Period. That’s how email is designed to work.
That’s good in that anyone who knows you and your email address can communicate with you via email.
It’s also bad, because anyone who knows your email address can send you junk trying to sell you stuff, get you to download malicious attachments, or fool you into handing over your private information when you shouldn’t.
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Blocking doesn’t work
On the surface, email blocking (or banning) seems like the perfect solution, but if you look deeper, spammers work around it instantly.
Blocking simply tells your email provider or email program to discard any email you get from a specific email address.
Unfortunately, spammers send email from fake addresses. They typically use a different fake email address on every message. I’d guess that your 300 spams a day are from 300 different email addresses. And those are 300 different email addresses from the 300 spams you got yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
The fake “From:” addresses are often designed to look like they come from your friends and acquaintances. If you block one of those because you got spam from it, then you’ve blocked your friend, who had nothing to do with the spam in the first place.
Blocking just isn’t a viable approach.
(And for the record, deleting history does nothing to spam.)
Unsubscribing does the opposite
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I often hear from people who click on the unsubscribe link sometimes included in spam emails.
Don’t. Clicking on an unsubscribe link in spam will get you more spam, not less.
Spammers do not honor unsubscribe requests. In fact, many use unsubscribe requests as a way to identify which of the millions of email addresses they’re using belong to real people. Those email addresses are more valuable, and as a result, they will get more spam.
Now, there’s an important distinction to be made here.
- Do use unsubscribe links from reputable providers, such as people you know and mailing lists you signed up to join.
- Do not use the unsubscribe links in emails that you don’t recognize or are obviously spam.
Good spam filters make life bearable
What does work are good spam filters.
Spam filters work by looking not just at where email comes from, but the nitty-gritty technical details of the email: what it’s about, what it says, how it says it, and how many other people are getting that same email message. If it looks like spam, the email is placed in your spam or junk mail folder instead of your inbox, and you never have to see it.
Of the hundreds of spam emails I get every day, I’d say fewer than five — perhaps even fewer than one or two — show up in my inbox.
If you have 300 spam emails arriving in your inbox every day, I’d guess that you’re not protected by a spam filter at all.
If you have 300 spam emails arriving in your spam folder every day, that’s the system working as it should.
Your spam filter
If you’re using webmail, like Yahoo!, you have a pretty good spam filter available to you already.
Most modern email programs, like Outlook or Thunderbird, also come equipped with a spam filter. Most enable it by default, and most allow you to tweak how aggressive it is in the program’s settings. Exactly how this works depends on your specific program.
However, just because you have a spam filter doesn’t mean you’re done.
Training the filter
The default spam filter offered by most email services or most programs is typically relatively good.2
But you can and should make it better.
You make it better by telling the service or program every time you find spam in your inbox. When you see spam in your inbox, right-click the message and click “Mark as spam” or its equivalent.
The message will be moved to your spam folder.
Doing this tells Yahoo! that messages like this are spam. It takes that information and uses it to refine its spam filter to get better at automatically detecting spam in the future. This could be either globally, if enough other people say the same things about emails like that, or perhaps just for you if the system’s spam filter supports that level of personalization.
Keep doing that, and the amount of spam you find in your inbox should decrease over time.
If you’re using a system other than Yahoo!, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or any other service, or if you’re using an email program such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or Windows Mail, take the time to learn its spam-filtering features. Most now have this type of “learning” spam filter that relies on you marking spam in your box when you find it.
False positives
People sometimes worry that they may lose email that is incorrectly filtered as spam.
It’s a valid concern. You should check your spam folder every so often to look for email that has been mistakenly filtered as spam.
But — and this is important — instead of just moving that email back to your inbox, mark it as Not spam instead.
This does the opposite of what the Mark as spam option does. It tells your email service or program that the selected message is not spam. The spam filter is then adjusted accordingly. As with spam, it may take correcting a few false positives before the filter starts getting it right consistently.
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Preventing spam in the first place
As I said, there’s no way to stop spam, but there are ways to deal with it in a way that makes it less of an issue.
Similarly, there’s no way to prevent it from starting. Eventually, all email addresses get spam.
What you can do is avoid asking for spam. Asking? Yes, asking.
We “ask for it” in several ways.
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- Posting an email address publicly. If your email address is visible on a webpage somewhere that anyone can visit, then “anyone” includes spammers. They harvest email addresses from webpages on the assumption that they are more likely to be real, active email addresses than simply guessing randomly (which they also do).
- Responding to or acting on spam. Replying to any form of spam signals the spammers that they have a real, live person at this email address, and that they should send you more spam; lots more spam, even if you ask them to unsubscribe you. Similarly, acting on spam (such as clicking on a spammer’s link or — horrors! — purchasing a product through spam) also tells spammers, “We’ve got a live one!”
- Enabling pictures in spam. The reason pictures are disabled by default on most spam-filtered email services is that the mere act of accessing an image so that it can be displayed can tell a spammer they have a real email address. Expect more spam.
- Giving your email address to the wrong person, company, or agency. This is one reason many people have more than one email address or create one-time or “throw-away” email addresses. Many companies share their email lists with others or even sell their customers’ email addresses. Reputable companies do not, so keep shopping at Amazon and the like, but be careful when dealing with a company you’ve never dealt with before. Consider creating and using a different email address for this purpose.
The list goes on. What’s worse is that it includes items that are not in your control.
- When you send a joke, photo, urban legend, rant, or what-have-you to a friend, and they then forward it on without removing your email address from the forward, your email address is now in the wild. Worse, when a friend sends you an email like that and does so by putting you and 200 other people on the To: or Cc: line, they’ve just advertised your email address to everyone else who got that email. And when they forward it without trimming your email address, your address goes out to potentially hundreds or thousands of people you don’t know. And some are spammers. There’s nothing you can do except perhaps teach your friends not to do that — but by then, it’s too late.
That’s why I say that sooner or later, every email address will get spam.
Do this
Mark spam as spam, and get on with your day.
You can’t stop spam, but you can manage it so that it becomes less of an annoyance. If that spam is landing in your spam or junk folder, then things are working as they should.
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