For years I have worked on trying to stop spam email, and it is always a battle. I have finally managed to tame it to the point where it is tolerable (that means I get virtually no spam email in my inbox). In this article, I will share my methods with you. There is nothing for sale, nothing to buy, nothing you have to click on and sign up for, just some ideas that might help. If any of these do help, all I ask is that you point your friends here so they too can tame the spam beast.
Let me start by saying I totally get why companies want to get your email address, and I understand that sometimes it is marketing through those email addresses that allow them to provide the services that they do. I get it, really. The problem is that it is so universally abused that it is way out of control.
If the people harvesting your email address never sold it to a spam email list, only send you emails that you double-opted in for, and then honored removal requests, then this article would not exist. Add to that the number of people who will send you spam trying to steal your credit card information or spread a virus. Unfortunately, this is not the case in a huge number of people who want your email address so sometimes you have to hurt a couple of people who didn’t do anything wrong in order to tame your inbox.
I would also recommend that you not attempt to get spam email revenge. What happens is resources that could be used to help stop spam from reaching your inbox are instead used to help the spammer instead. Not to mention the, at best, questionable legality of it.
Now let’s give the term spam email meaning (spam meaning). Spam email to me (and only me), is any email I did not explicitly ask for, or that I would normally expect as a normal course of conversation that I initiated. So if I place an order online, and I gave them my email, I expect an order confirmation and maybe a shipping notice. Anything else, spam.
So, how do you stop unwanted email? Read on and let’s see!
1: Don’t give out your email!
That’s right, just say no. I know it is had to believe but all those companies that say you have to give them an email, most of them are lying. I have bank accounts with apps on my phone, no email. I have Verizon smartphones and tablets, and Verizon doesn’t have my email. I have bought new cars from the dealer, with no email address. I know, it’s tough when they are in the middle of asking you thirty questions and up comes the “your email address?” question, just train yourself to say “I don’t have one”. End of conversation.
If that doesn’t work give out a fake one. It’s not like they can check it while you are in line at the store. This will absolutely stop spam email.
2: Use a disposable email for online accounts
Need access to an online resource that requires you to validate your email address before they will let you in? Use a service such as 10minutemail.com which is a completely free site that allows you to get a disposable email address that lasts for, you guessed it, ten minutes. This is one of my favorite ways to get past those sites that just want to harvest your email address, and then sell it so their service can remain free.
The downside here is that once you are finished here and ten minutes has expired (you can extend it in 10-minute increments by clicking a button) and closed the web page, that email address is gone and you can never use it again.
3: Use an email service with outstanding email filtering
No matter what you do, you can not completely stop spam email. It is important to have a good spam filter to get rid of the spam you do get. Even if you follow all the rules you will eventually get on a spam list. How is that you might ask?
Email addresses are made up of two parts, the user and the domain. If your domain name is YourDomain.com, then all someone has to do is start sending out emails using a username generator, spam email generator, or spam mail generator which will start with a, b, c, d, …….aa, ab, ac, ad, ….. and so on, millions of them. Their system then watches for the bounced messages and removes those from the list. What remains are valid email accounts and they can sell or use the list they created themselves. Remember, this isn’t a person doing this work, it is an email spam bot, a computer, all automatically. The spam email bot works around the clock.
Yes, people actually do this. Heck, companies actually do this.
So back to my original point, spam filtering. One of the best spam filters I have seen is on Google’s Gmail service. If you have your own domain name you can use their GSuite services and run all your email off their servers. Otherwise, you can set up a free Gmail account and have it check your email from another service, using the Google filters to clean it up before you see it.
Other services can be good as well, I have had good luck with Microsoft Outlook online’s filters, and many web hosting companies such as GoDaddy and 1and1. Just remember, no matter how good your email or hosting services are, if their spam filters aren’t working, you are wasting time and money. Switch to a better service today and let them help you stop spam email.
4: Use a staging address
A staging address is a secondary email address you use to test if someone is going to spam you. It protects you against a specific company continuing to email you after you ask them not to. For example, you sign up for a rewards card with EvilSpamCompany, and all of a sudden you start getting a ton of marketing from marketing@EvilSpamCompany.com, welcome@, promotions@, sales@ and a whole host of other names, all at EvilSpamCompany.com. This can stop that cold.
Let’s say your email is danny@YourDomain.com. You can create the email address of spam@YourDomain.com and give that out to everyone who asks for an email. Then you set up a forwarder to forward all mail from spam@ to danny@. Once you see you are getting spammed by EvilSpamCompany.com you can simply blacklist their domain and you will no longer get emails from them forwarded into your danny@ inbox.
So you are thinking, why not just do the same thing on your danny@ account and skip the whole second account with forwarders thing? Wouldn’t this still stop spam email? Good questions! The reason is that because now EvilSpamCompany does not have your real email and if they were to give it away or sell it, your real email address is still protected.
If you have someone using the spam@ email address for quite a while and you do not receive anything you consider spam from them, it should be a simple matter to contact them and change your email address over to your real one.
5: Use multiple staging addresses
The problem with the previous way to stop spam email is EvilSpamCompany might never once send you a spam email themselves but may sell your email address a hundred times getting you inundated with spam, all while their hands look clean. There is a way to stop this too, by having every company have their own staging address.
Most web hosts today allow you to have an unlimited number of email addresses for your domain. You need this or at least a very high number of allowable email addresses for this plan to work.
What you do is that for every company that needs your email address, you give them their own spam email address. A good example might be to use the company name, a dot, and SP for spam. So let’s say you signed up for a rewards program put on by Target and another one by Walmart. Those two email addresses could be target.sp@YourDomain.com and walmart.sp@YourDomain.com respectively.
Now when using this setup you find out not only which companies are spamming you directly, but also which ones are selling your email address to others. When you find one that is spamming you or that has sold your address, simply delete that email address from your server and that will stop spam email from them and everyone they sold your address to as well.
While this is by far the most effective method, it is also the most time consuming and requires you to have your own domain name and service that allows you to create, check and delete email addresses easily.
Bonus tip!
When you get spam there may be an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. If this is a reputable mailing list like one from Macy’s letting you know what is on the current sale, then that link is probably perfectly fine to click on to get removed from their mailing list and stop spam email.
I say probably because no one said it really came from Macy’s. You need to check the actual email address it came from and make sure it is macys.com, or something like mailings.macys.com, note that it always should end in macys.com. If you see something like macys.com.ru, or macysmailing.list@gmail.com, then those are fake emails which you should never click on any links or buttons in.
The other problem here is that if this is not a reputable mailing list, that same link might be used to verify that you actually read these spams and instead of this being able to stop spam email, it actually can increase it. Clicking the link might actually take you to a page that appears to allow you to remove your email address from a mailing list, but that could all be fake.
My recommendation is to never click on the unsubscribe link unless you are certain that this is a list you signed up for and want to be removed. In my example above, making a purchase from Macy’s very well might have put you on their mailing list so it would be safe to assume it was a legitimate email and to click the unsubscribe link after verifying it came from macys.com.
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