Stopping spam 2023

Email connects friends, family, and colleagues. Spam—also known as junk mail—is its dark side.

Stopping junk mail takes persistence, patience, and steps. That may not be enough to remove or reduce your daily spam, but you can try.

Discover junk mail and how to stop it.

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Junk mail?

Junk mail, like physical mail, is unsolicited advertising. Viruses and malware in junk mail might destroy your PC. Understand junk mail to stop it. Businesses selling mailing lists with your contact information generate most spam. Deception and above-board methods are used to gather this information.

After you registered an account on a merchant or company’s website, a mailing list could have received your information. Sometimes this information is gathered when someone fools you into applying online for a “free” gift or visiting a fake government or official site.

Most email providers now filter spam from valid messages. However, nothing is infallible, so these unpleasant messages may appear in your mailbox.

Immediate actions

There are ways to fight junk mail. Some help with emails, while others are proactive.

Use an email spam filter first: Most top email services automatically filter spam messages. These tools automatically filter spam.

Junk mail filters scan incoming emails for keywords and phrases that are common in spam. Thus, junk mail filters remove spam and protect you from phishing fraud.

Don’t open emails from strangers. If you’ve already done so, don’t click on unsolicited email links. When you do, you risk installing harmful files on your computer, receiving personal information requests from sketchy websites, and receiving more junk mail.

Unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters. Visit a website and submit your contact info to get these messages. If you’re buying a car, a site may ask for your name and email address. Junk mail is rising because mailing list firms sell that information.

There are several methods. First, check email footers for unsubscribe links. Following the “unsubscribe” instructions will remove you from that mailing list. Contact the sender to be removed from the list. When emails don’t have unsubscribe links, this works best.

A newsletter management provider can erase your name from future communications. Best newsletter management platforms make unsubscribing easy. These providers respond quickly to these requests, but mail may not drop off immediately.

You should also consider using Surfshark’s Incogni tool, which will discover and communicate with dozens of data brokers to remove your personal data from their databases. Over 4,000 data brokers collect customer data worldwide. Yes, 4,000!

Proactive measures

To stop junk mail, modify your internet habits. These are:

Stay away: Companies—good and bad—crave your personal data. Therefore, guard this information from now on. Consider whether it’s worth giving your email to a new website without buying. Read the fine print before giving this information.

Use a different email address to register: Use this email for website registrations only. Solicitations are already isolated from emails from your primary account. Apple’s Hide My Mail or the open-source SimpleLogin(opens in new tab) may be better ways to do this. These technologies redirect your email to random addresses to protect your privacy. You can immediately erase these incident-specific addresses.

Start over: If spam is impossible to avoid, consider the nuclear option and change email addresses. This would necessitate creating a new email account and notifying critical contacts, including business partners. Use the new address and adjust your online habits after that laborious job.

Stopping junk mail is difficult but feasible. There are ways to reduce spam. Luckily, your email provider handles some of the easiest procedures. You can also take proactive actions to better your condition.

See also greatest safe email providers and 9 internet security advice.