Comping email swamped with spam to the extent that I'm worried about missing wins

Rollswiththepunches

I'd like to ask for the advice of other, more experienced compers regarding an issue I'm having. I have a separate email address specifically for comping. I receive hundreds of spam emails every day. I suspect a large amount of these are from competition providers who I have shared my details with when entering their comps. A lot of them are newsletters or general promotional spam from the same companies or individuals. I am also worried that I might accidentally delete a legitimate email informing me of a win - for example anything says "congratulations" or "winner" in it. I've had quite a lot of those that have turned out to be spam.

How do others compers manage this? Should I go through all the newsletters and click unsubscribe? Do you delete spam emails in bulk?

marcia_

it's hard work but if you have emails on preview you need to scan the title and the first line of the email for winner, completion or congratulations. Takes ages then you can delete them on mass. I go to unread, scan emails then click to highlight them all then delete all.

I don't enter competitions where you will only know if you read their newsletter in which they send a link to for you to read.

I don't click unsubscribe because some competitions require you to be receiving emails to win. Though if you don't open emails for a long time they often delete you anyway.

gdmoney

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81945348#Comment_81945348

If you are using MS Outlook, easier than visual scanning is to set up rules so that, for example, emails with words like congratulations, winner, win, etc get moved into a separate folder.

One-Eye

I have 4 email addresses on the go. One is strictly business (financial, medical etc). One is a long term address for friends, family and regular shopping. I don't enter any comps with these two addresses.

The other two are for comping. One I used for entering comps in 2025, and haven't used for entering this year. I will delete it Christmas 2026. I created a new one 01/01/2026 and am using that to enter this year. I repeat this process each year and so far the Spam problem has always been manageable.

Sometimes a comp promoter forgets to clear entries from a previous iteration of their comp and you can't enter using the email you used last time - so having a second email address helps when this happens.

danny13579

I just use a gmail address for comps (along with a burner phone and a pseudonym for all non-cash comps). If I have a win, it will be addressed to me only and so go into my in box. Spam (usually addressed to mailing lists) automatically goes into the spam folder, never to be seen.

If a winning email accidentally goes into my spam folder, so be it. Life's too short to be wading through spam! 🤑