Your email address may have been listed on various websites. You signed up for an online course - and your email ended up in the database of people who run mass mailings. Without noticing, you started receiving tons of emails: standard newsletters, sudden messages about winning a prize, or messages with no actual value at all? You can fight this!
To shield yourself from unwanted mail clutter, several potential solutions have been created.
Email spam is a problem of the modern internet that needs to be fought
1. Do not give out your personal work email on websites or on resources where you plan to take part in contests. It is more practical to have two email addresses and manage them through a single email client. You use the main one everywhere spam is impossible by definition: social networks, important resources, trusted stores. The second one is used on sites where you leave an email for contact purposes;
2. Installing a spam filter. The most popular programs with built-in filters are The Bat, Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook Express. However, after installing the program, it still needs to be «trained». The standard spam-blocking functions will only work well after you have fully taught the filter to recognize unwanted emails.
Mailboxes that send emails like «claim your prize» or «you have won an award» very often use the same addresses, which should be added to SpamAssassin (a dedicated folder);
3. Completely blocking the addresses the mailings come from. You can create a blacklist of senders who do not just send store promotions but deliberately «flood» your mailbox with useless junk. Set aside 20 minutes to analyze the senders, and the risk of receiving spam will drop to 20%.
The standard algorithms of @mail.ru and @gmail.com work, but not as effectively
The Mail.ru filter automatically marks as spam all emails from a sender you once moved to the SPAM folder. Google mail works on the same principle.
However, keep in mind - even if you have shielded yourself from such emails by moving them to the SPAM folder, the risk of receiving them still remains.
On Linux, in the ISPManager 5 control panel, a blacklist of senders is created automatically when a mail account is set up; the program tracks them by IP, and from then on emails from spammers are not shown in any folder at all. You will never even know such emails arrived.
This happens because there is a so-called «grey» list of IP addresses. The filter works on a smart algorithm and does not accept the emails; instead, it sends back a message informing the sender that the email was not delivered.
If a useful message was sent to you by a real person, that person will most likely try to send it again, and then the filter will let the email through. A spammer will not retry sending an email 2 or more times from the same address (high risk of ending up in the spam folder).
An additional protection method that takes time
Are you receiving 500-1000 newsletter emails in your mailbox every day? That is not just unusual - it is a critical level. In that case you need to set aside half a day or a full day to clean your important email address of spam. To do this you will have to open every email from an unwanted mailing, find the "unsubscribe" button at the very bottom, and click it. Unsubscribing will reduce the amount of spam you receive by at least 60%.
Even if you use your email address only to sign in to accounts on websites or social networks and rarely use the mailbox for work, it is still recommended to enable at least a standard spam filter to protect against unwanted content.