How To Avoid Receiving Spam Emails? - 10 Tips On How To Avoid Receiving Spam Emails

Date First Published: 6th March 2023

Topic: Computer Networking

Topic: Network Services

Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers

Difficulty Level: 3/10

Learn about how to avoid receiving spam emails in this article.

Spam is a form of unsolicited and often unwanted email that is usually sent to a large number of people for advertising, marketing, and phishing purposes. Spam emails can clutter your inbox and take the main focus of your important messages, especially if they are not detected as spam or moved to the junk email folder. If you have an email account, it is likely that you have received at least some spam. Below are 10 tips on how to avoid receiving spam emails and keep your inbox free from spammers.

1. Avoid Posting Your Email Address Publicly

Your email address is a form of personal information that you should avoid revealing publicly. The most common way that you can be vulnerable to spam is by posting your email address publicly, like on internet forums, chatrooms, newsgroups, and comments sections. If you post your email address publicly, anyone can see it and send you spam. Spambots often crawl the internet for email addresses and automatically send spam emails to a large number of addresses at once.

If you absolutely need to reveal your email address publicly, you should set up a temporary email account or make your email address harder to capture by spambots, such as 'contact(at)websiteowner.com'. The 'at' represents the @ symbol. Even though people will have to manually type your email address and won't be able to click on it to open their email application with your email in the 'to' field, this will reduce the chances of your email address being captured by spambots as these are designed to crawl the web and detect email addresses.

2. Use A Temporary Email Address

If you have to provide an email address to a site, but do not want to provide your real email address, you can use a temporary email address, also known as a throwaway email address. A temporary email address allows you to receive email messages in the same way as a normal email, but the email address will expire within a short period of time, usually an hour. DisposableMail.com is an example of a service that provides users with a temporary email address to help keep their real email addresses private and safe from spam.

3. Avoid Automatic Loading Of Images In Email Applications

When viewing an email, a web beacon might be hidden in the email to confirm that it has been opened, which can be used for spam purposes as they can verify which email addresses are valid so that spammers can target them for more spam emails. This is the reason why by default, most email applications do not automatically load images in emails.

4. Do Not Reply To Spam Emails

If you receive a spam email, you should ignore and delete it, not reply to it or ask to be removed or unsubscribed, unless you are familiar with the company. This is because spammers use this as a way of verifying that the email address is valid and that the account is active so that they can target you for even more spam or use this to subscribe you to other mailing lists or share it with other companies to send you more spam.

5. Do Not Forward Chain Emails

Chain emails are designed to get you to forward the email to other people and create as many copies as possible of the email message. These emails are often false and are only designed to collect all email addresses of recipients to target them for even more spam. If you forward the email message to another recipient, it will usually show the email addresses of everyone you have sent it to. The risk is that it is unknown what the sender of the chain letter will do with the list of all the email addresses. Therefore, if you receive a chain email, do not forward it to any other recipients and delete it from your inbox.

6. Look For A Checkbox For Receiving Emails When Signing Up

When you sign up for an account, a lot of sites have a checkbox that asks if you want to receive a newsletter by email. Some users forget that this box is already ticked and unexpectedly receive spam. Therefore, if you don't want to receive a newsletter by email, do not tick the box. You should also read the terms of use document before subscribing to something. Some of these terms might include an agreement to receive regular emails from the company or permission to share your information with third parties, which you won't be aware of if you don't read the terms of use. This is why reading the terms of use is an easy way to keep unnecessary spam out of your inbox.

7. Consider Using A Complex Username For Your Email Address That Is Hard To Guess

Spambots often spam a long list of common usernames to a domain name, like '[email protected]', '[email protected]', and '[email protected]'. If you use a common username, you are more likely to be targeted with spam. A complex username like '[email protected]' is much harder to guess than '[email protected]'.

8. Set Up Email Rules To Filter Spam Emails

Most email applications allow you to set up rules to filter spam emails. For example, Gmail has an option to 'Filter messages like this'. Gmail will then write a form with the most appropriate filtering criteria and once you create the filter, email messages that meet the criteria (e.g. contain those specific words) will automatically be moved to the junk email folder or deleted. Microsoft Outlook also has an option to create email rules so that emails that match a specific criteria will be automatically moved to the junk email folder, archived, or deleted. You should check your email application's guide on how to set up email rules.

9. Block The Sender Of The Spam Emails

Nearly all email applications have an option to block a sender. If you block the sender, all emails from that sender will automatically be moved to the spam folder or deleted. This is useful when you are struggling to unsubscribe from a mailing list or you keep receiving spam from the same email address over and over again. Note that some spammers use fake email addresses that vary with every spam message, so you might find that the spam emails continue even after blocking the sender.

10. Sign Up For A New Email Address

This is the last resort and you should only think about signing up for a new email address if all the tips above do not work for you and the number of spam messages you are getting is out of control. If you sign up for a new email address and stop using your old one, all of your senders will need to know your new email address so that they send the message to the new address, not the old one. Sometimes, a new email address may be the only way to stop receiving spam email messages if it is persistent and severe.

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