What's the Secret - Email Spam

Terrysdelight

Hi

Where am I going wrong?   I am constantly inundated with spam emails.  I'm forever deleting and unsubscribing etc, yet they are still building up.  I have about 9000 emails in my inbox.

If I close my email account and start up another - how do I stop the same thing happening again?

Many thanks
Terrysdelight

tempus_fugit

What email service and/or client are you using? I use gmail and get hardly any spam, or rather, the bulk of it gets rooted out by gmail itself and I only actually see the odd one every few weeks or so to handle manually.

Supatramp

I use Thunderbird as an email client for 5 email accounts, and get very little spam.

I was recently being plagued by one a day supposedly from PayPal but that has now stopped,  and the odd one supposedly from American Express, I've never had an AE card, and occasionally supposedly from Amazon.

But 9000???

k_man

Over what period were the 9000 emails received, and which email client and provider do you use?

Just deleting spam messages doesn't help reduce future spam, just clears your folders.

Marking as junk/spam instead helps your email client (or service, depending what you use to access email).
This doesn't do much to stop the spam being sent, but helps stop it reaching you.

Finally, if these messages are spam, (and not just unwanted marketing from senders you have dealt with) then clicking unsubscribe can make it worse, as that flags your mailbox (with the spam senders) as a live/active one, and so good for even more spam!

400ixl

Using the same email address for lots of sites increases the risk as it only takes one of those sites to get hacked and the list of email addresses to get sold on to spammers.

Personally I have my own domain name and can use a unique email address for every site. So if one of those emails gets spam I can just block it without impact to all of the others.

You can do the similar with gmail with the + option. If your email is username@gmail.com you can make it unique with username+websitename@gmail.com. You can then filter or block based on the full email address. This also makes it fairly easy to remember the email address if you need to logon with it.

To remove the need to remember the login details is to use a password manager like Bitwarden which also allows you to use complex passwords which also adds to your online security. Add to that 2 factor authentication from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple and you can add a decent level of security and spam resistance.

Terrysdelight

k_man said:

Over what period were the 9000 emails received, and which email client and provider do you use?

Just deleting spam messages doesn't help reduce future spam, just clears your folders.

Marking as junk/spam instead helps your email client (or service, depending what you use to access email).
This doesn't do much to stop the spam being sent, but helps stop it reaching you.

Finally, if these messages are spam, (and not just unwanted marketing from senders you have dealt with) then clicking unsubscribe can make it worse, as that flags your mailbox (with the spam senders) as a live/active one, and so good for even more spam!

Hi

Yes this is it.  It is all constant marketing.  And yes, I am forever clicking unsubcribe.  My email is Outlook.  I do have a gmail account of about 12 months but I don't really like it.  I find it really hard to navigate and find emails etc.

Terrysdelight

400ixl said:

Using the same email address for lots of sites increases the risk as it only takes one of those sites to get hacked and the list of email addresses to get sold on to spammers.

Personally I have my own domain name and can use a unique email address for every site. So if one of those emails gets spam I can just block it without impact to all of the others.

You can do the similar with gmail with the + option. If your email is username@gmail.com you can make it unique with username+websitename@gmail.com. You can then filter or block based on the full email address. This also makes it fairly easy to remember the email address if you need to logon with it.

To remove the need to remember the login details is to use a password manager like Bitwarden which also allows you to use complex passwords which also adds to your online security. Add to that 2 factor authentication from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple and you can add a decent level of security and spam resistance.

Thank you.   I think having my own domain name is the answer.  I have actually seen a domain which is suitable.  Do I have to pay for the domain name to be hosted in order to get the email?  Ie, do I have to have a website in order to get my email?

Many thanks.

Robin9

Does Outlook give you the means of blocking or filtering emails ?

400ixl

Terrysdelight said:

Thank you.   I think having my own domain name is the answer.  I have actually seen a domain which is suitable.  Do I have to pay for the domain name to be hosted in order to get the email?  Ie, do I have to have a website in order to get my email?

Many thanks.

Many domain registrations allow for mail forwarding without the need for any need to pay for hosting. You do of course pay them for the domain itself.

k_man

 Using your own domain for email is an option, but does add a level of complexity.
E.g. you sometimes need to be able to send as the unique email address (for the recipient to validate you)  so have to manually add each one to your client.

As suggested above, start with getting to grips with the basics of filter/sort/block email based on rules first (this will be required for unique email addresses too).
And make sure to mark actual spam as spam/junk.

Just be careful of blocking legitimate emails from that sender.

Finally, unsubscribing and not choosing to receive marketing emails should stop virtually all marketing emails.