If you’ve recently seen a surge in spam, your email has likely been compromised and leaked to a spam database. But you won’t be able to directly stop the spam emails coming to this email.
Even if you may’tstopspam, you may howevermanageandfilterit well enough to essentially achieve the same feat.
Disable Beacon Features
Emails sometimes contain images or other forms of content that need to be fetched from an external server.
When such content is loaded, the sender knows that your email is active. Unless aproxy or VPNis involved, they’ll also know your IP address.
Similarly, some emails are sent with read requests. Depending on the email service and software used, anautomatic read receiptmay be sent back. This means the sender now knows you’ve opened the email.
Spammers can use features like these toverify that your email is active. So, to minimize your chances of being scoped out, I recommenddisabling such beacon featuresbefore anything else.
Keep an Eye Out for MailBombing
You should be aware of theworst-case scenariofirst. Spammers sometimes send hundreds or thousands of spam mail to an email address in a short period of time. This is done to overwhelm the recipient.
They expect the recipient to either ignore or mass-delete the emails. Either way, their ultimate goal is that legitimate emails buried between all the spam will also beignored or deleted.
Here’s thekey detail– one of your accounts with financial accessmay have been compromised(e-commerce, travel, hotel booking, etc.).
This happens quite often– the spammers make purchases via this compromised account. Then, they mailbomb you to hide the transaction mail amidst the spam.
This is why we disabled the beacon features first. you may now open each email individually to verify that this type of fraud isn’t happening in your case. After you’ve confirmed that all your accounts are secure, move on to the next step.
Unsubscribe From Spam
Unsubscribing from spam senders seems like the most obvious solution at first – but there’s more to this topic than it lets on.
To combat this, we’ll look into the most effective ways tofilter/managespam next.
Fine Tune Your Spam Filter
All the major email service providers and programs use some form of a spam filter. Theyanalyze emails for spam-associated identifierslike marketing terms, suspicious links, emails from sources with a poor reputation, etc.
These filters are of course, not perfect. Sometimes they let spam pass through, or mark legitimate emails as spam. I’veexperienced this myself with Gmail, which has one of the best spam filters.
There are two main ways to train the filter and make itmuchbetterat identifying and managing spam.
Set Up Extra Filter Rules
If the spam filter isn’t automatically detecting these, you canset up manual filter rulesto block mail containing such patterns.
Anti-Spam Practices To Follow
Besides optimizing your spam filter, here are the best practices to follow to minimize your chances of receiving spam:
