No one likes email spam! At best, it is an annoying waste of time; at worst, it can contain harmful malware or hoaxes. But don’t worry, mail.com has got your back, with powerful filters that are highly effective in keeping your inbox a spam-free zone.
Keep spam emails away from your inbox with these tricks!
But for those rare spam emails that slip through the cracks, check out our list for five ways you can join the fight against spam.
First, the good news: Thanks to our dedicated team of mail security experts, our email spam filters and blockers have a success rate of over 99 percent. This means you rarely even see most of the junk mail, phishing mails and viruses that spammers try to send your way.
“But wait!” you might say. “I don’t even want to see one percent of the spam that’s out there.” And because we feel the same way, we offer several inbox features that give you an additional layer of protection against spam.
For example, some emails might not be “spam” in the sense that they come from a known spammer or blacklisted sender, but you still find them annoying – like mass mailings from a business that’s legitimate, but you’re just not interested in. It’s possible to “train” your mail.com spam filter to weed out emails like this. If you mark them as spam, such messages will be immediately moved to your inbox’s Spam folder. And based on your actions, your spam filter will learn what you consider to be junk mail.
And here we come to an important point: DON’T DELETE AN EMAIL YOU THINK IS SPAM! A survey conducted by our company in June 2021 revealed that only 24 percent of email users regularly mark messages they consider to be junk mail as spam. But the truth is, if you want your inbox spam filter to live up to its name, you should always move unwanted emails to the correct folder – either by selecting the message and clicking the Spam button in the inbox, or by dragging and dropping the message to the Spam folder. Every unwelcome message that you mark helps your junk mail filter learn what counts as spam, whereas simply deleting or ignoring it shows the system that you think messages from that sender are okay.
Select an email and click Spam to send it to your Spam folder – and train your spam filter
Five mail.com anti-spam tips
In addition to making good use of your inbox spam filter, here are five pointers you can use to help keep your inbox spam-free:
Make sure the mail.com spam protection is activated in your Mail Security settings. Don’t worry – its default setting is “activated,” so as long as you haven’t deliberately turned it off, it runs automatically. For you own protection, you shouldn’t deactivate it.
Be careful when you open emails and click on links. Make sure the sender is someone you know and trust and that nothing seems “off” about the message (as discussed in our post on phishing scams). If anything rings an alarm bell, mark the message as spam or report it to our Help Center.
Don’t just leave messages you think are spam in your inbox. They usually don’t cause problems sitting there unopened, but when you decide to give your inbox a good spring cleaning, during the process of scrolling and sorting you might accidently open or even click on a link in one of the unwanted messages. This gives the spammer confirmation that your email address actually exists. The logical consequence? Even more spam. And it really starts getting dangerous if the email has links and content that are infected with malware.
Be careful about where you share your email address. You really shouldn’t post it anywhere on the internet – blogs, forums, social media – where just anyone can see it. Cybercriminals actively search places like this for addresses to send spam to.
You should never, ever reply to a spam email. Replying to such a message lets the spammer know that your email address exists and is in active use, which in turn makes them more likely to send you more spam.
Did you find these spam-prevention tips useful? Let us know below!
