How to Reduce Spam Emails

How to Reduce Spam Emails

Everyone hates spam. The most annoying thing is when you wake up, you’ve taken your first sip of coffee in the morning and head over to your computer to begin planning your day. You open up your emails and voila; the spam gods have blessed you with a flood of spam emails while you slept so you can enjoy siphoning through your messages in the morning. We all hate spam, and in this article I’ll discuss some common sense measures you can take to help reduce the amount of spam you receive, or hopefully, stop spam from entering your inbox (well, as much as possible).

“How can I stop all this spam?” is a question I get asked on a daily basis. Some people seem baffled by the amount of spam they receive and claim they have no idea why spambots have targeted them. True enough, if you receive a lot of spam chances are you are not completely to blame, but you could be partially to blame for the flood of spam emails you receive.

“How is it my fault?!” you yell in dismay? Well, let’s start as far back as possible. When was the last time you entered your email address for one of those ‘free offers’ to win something? How about entering your email address to receive a ‘free’ ebook download? Maybe you entered your email address to receive a newsletter? If any of these sound familiar, then keep reading. If not, then you may as well leave now, I can’t help you if you’re not being honest with yourself.

The main thing to remember when entering your email address to receive anything is that you should read the fine print. Many newsletter lists will ‘share’ their lists with their ‘partner’ firms, which basically means they’re selling their lists. If you go online and search for email lists to purchase for a marketing campaign, you’ll find millions of them. Most are even conveniently organized by industry for you. These ‘partner’ firms now have your email address, so you’ll start receiving emails (spam) from them.

So how can you stop spam? Honestly, you can’t stop it completely unless you deactivate your email address and set up a new one. Be protective of your email address! Don’t use your normal email address to sign up for free offers and stuff. For example, I created a free yahoo email account that I use when I need to enter an email address to receive newsletters and free offers.

If you unsubscribe from a newsletter that’s already sold your email address to another list, it’ll be almost impossible to track every list you’re now on, and remove yourself. The best method I can recommend is increasing your spam settings on your mail server. For example, hosting clients on my server have access to spam assassin, which is an anti spam program on the server. The lower the score you set on spam assassin, the more aggressive it is. For example, if you set spam assassin to 3, that’s pretty tight so chances are some legitimate emails will land in your spam box. The important thing here is you need to kind of train your spam program, by actively marking junk as spam, so the program knows how to start scoring similar spam messages.