Last week I talked about exactly how spammers get your email address and why they keep sending you those emails about ransoming the Nigerian prince. If you haven’t already listened to that episode, I highly recommend doing so because it will act as a primer to this whole world of spam email.
But knowing where spam comes from and why is only half the battle. That's why today we're going to discuss the steps you can take to avoid spam cluttering your inbox.
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Use Disposable Email Addresses
First and foremost, use a disposable email address for any temporary account, or for when you need to provide and email address for something you’re likely to use only once. There are a ton of websites that will give you a free temporary email address, such as 10minutemail.com or mailinator.com. These websites don’t require anything to sign up and they are completely free to use.
I could do a whole episode just on the uses of a disposable email address and how they work, but in a nutshell what happens is you visit the website and it will generate an email address that’s completely random. From there, you copy that address into whatever website or program is asking for your email. When an email arrives, it will show up in the window you originally copied your random email from.
Once you close your browser window,the email address is destroyed, so don’t use this for anything that you may need in the future. What’s awesome about disposable email addresses is is that you’re not giving out your real email to anyone! I’ve been using this tactic for years and it works wonders to keep my actual email inbox spam-free.
Unsubscribe from Newsletters and Alerts
The next step in clearing up your inbox and cutting down on spam is to unsubscribe from any news emails or alerts that may show up in your inbox on a regular basis. If you just search your inbox for the word "unsubscribe," you’ll typically see a list of alerts and news-based emails that you may not want to receive anymore, or that just clutter your inbox up.
See also: Unsubscribe from Everything to Take Charge of Your Inbox
I typically only allow Quick and Dirty Tips newsletters and critical alerts in my inbox (such as messages from my bank). I’ve completely unsubscribed from notifications from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other web sites. It keeps my inbox clutter-free and much easier to navigate.
Mark Spam as Spam
If you use an internet-based email provider such as Yahoo or Gmail, you should mark spam or junk mail as such. This helps the email provider to improve their algorithms in detecting spam messages across the board for every user.
For example, if a message gets marked as spam by 100 users, it may be flagged as spam for everyone else. This is a reason why you should never mark a newsletter as spam. If enough people do this, you could send legitimate newsletters that people rely on to junk mail. Not good.
Don’t Give Your Email Address to Public Websites
Another super easy way to cut down on junk mail is to avoid giving your real email address to public websites such as Facebook, tech support forums, or anywhere else that is public. If you include your actual email address in a public web space, it will make you vulnerable to having your email address found by programs that crawl the internet looking for email addresses to spam. I mentioned this in last week’s episode, so if you haven't yet checked it out, please do so right away.
DIsable Images from Loading Automatically
This next tip is pretty advanced and I just discovered it myself pretty recently.
You should disable images from automatically loading when you open an email, especially if it's from someone you don't know. You’ll have to Google to see how to set this up for your email service specifically, as it is different from provider to provider.
The reason why is pretty interesting. When a spammer includes an image in their email, they will make sure that the image loads from a website or domain that they own. By adding a little bit of code to the email, they can identify if you’ve opened their message simply by seeing if the image they included in the spam email has loaded.
Once they see that you’ve seen the email, they know that your address is active, and they will begin to send you even more mail.
Use Gmail Aliases
One super cool feature of Gmail is that they allow you to create aliases that all funnel emails back to your main address.
For example, say my Gmail address is Eric@gmail.com (it isn't, but let's just pretend). I could have email sent to Eric+Newsletter@gmail.com. Anything after the plus will work just as your normal Gmail address would. If you were to send an email to that address, it would still go to the same inbox as any of your other email would.
What’s really useful about this is that if you start getting a lot of junk mail at Eric+Newsletter@gmail.com, you’ll be able to know that whatever company you signed up with has either leaked that email somehow, or has maybe even sold it to a spammer. But now that you know, you can easily filter out anything sent to that address to have it go to a specific folder or just be deleted.
I use this whenever I sign up for newsletters, rewards accounts, or pretty much anything else you can sign up for online!
If you have your own domain, you can set up a catch-all email account which basically means that anything sent to @yourdomain.com will be sent to your actual email address. Companies use this to catch any email sent to a wrong address because this way, even if a name is misspelled, the email will at least make it to someone in the organization instead of getting dropped completely.
If you own your own domain, you can create a ton of different emails for yourself with no set-up at all! Say you want to sign up for a newsletter, well you can simply sign up with the email newsletter@yourdomain.com and then easily block it or see who else starts to email that address. It may sound complicated to set-up but luckily it’s super easy.
Here's a link for how to do this.
Well, that’s it for today. Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at quickanddirtytips.com/techtalker. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook.com/QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!