I know your pain, folks. I’ve learned my lesson the hard way. Below are some other options I have discovered.
Using Apple Mail
Per Apple’s advice. Use the Junk filters in Apple mail under preferences. Also, never respond to spam. Replying or clicking the “Unsubscribe” link will only generate more spam, because they now know that the email address is valid.
THEN…The best thing you can do going forward is, not to give out your email address online for any reason. Use it only to correspond with others. We should also make your email address unscannable on your website like “name [at] yourwebsite [dot] com“. “Robots” (scripts created to scrape websites for addresses) can quickly gather thousands of emails at a time from websites where the email addresses are made public. Also, sometimes humans actually grab e-mails off websites to use them for sign-up offers in order to get free stuff. Create a gmail account for signing up for stuff online (below).
Using gmail for custom domain or as a second address for online accounts
Using Gmail’s “Apps for Work“, you can opt to configure gmail to get addresses at your domain for you and your team like joe@yourcompany.com. Gmail is secure, reliable and has very strong spam filters. You can use your Gmail account to send and receive your domain email address by setting up your domains email address as a POP3> and SMTP account at Gmail. In Motion Hosting has a great article explaining how to set up Gmail to use your domain email address. If you need help with this, don’t hesitate to contact us to provide support.
Disposable email addresses with Gmail
If configuring Gmail sounds daunting, a simpler option is to use a disposable email address to identify and shake off sources of spam. Create a Gmail account with youremailname@gmail.com. Then, you can add a “+” button to your email address. For example, you can signup for newsletters like youremailname+newsletters@gmail.com. Then you can use that email and change the +word for different signups. Then you can use Gmail’s powerful spam filters. Most spam is automatically detected and placed in your Spam folder, where it will be deleted after 30 days. If you receive a message in your inbox that you believe is spam, check the box next to it and click the “Report Spam” button in the top toolbar. If you do this by accident, you can click the Undo link at the top of the page to recover it. Like Apple’s Mail, as you report messages as spam, Gmail will improve its automatic filtering. If there is a message in your Spam folder that is a legitimate email, check it and click the “Not spam” button. Ensure that it is truly a legitimate email before doing this and Gmail will relocate it to your inbox.
Reporting Spam
Before you delete your spam, forward your spam to: spam@uce.gov. This is the Spam box for FTC (Federal Trade Commission). Mail sent to this box is investigated. If it is indeed spam, the original sender can be charged $500 per email. The more mail they get from different users but same spammer, the more it’s likely to be investigated. You can report spam to anti-spam organizations such as SpamCop and KnujOn, who will report spammers to ISPs and government agencies.
There are more options with Yahoo and Outlook at the source link below.
SOURCES
- Wikihow.com-Stop-Spam
- All Spammed Up – Teaching people how to identify spam
- Techchai.com – How to stop spam emails 6 most effective ways to filter junk emails
- Google – Apps for Work
- Spamcop.net
- Microsoft.com – Change the level of protection in the junk email filter
- Spam-reader.com
- Hongkiat.com – 5 simple steps to fight spam