How to Prevent Spam Emails in Gmail.com
Isn’t it amazing how you open an email address today and within a week, you’re already getting emails from people you don’t even know? This sometimes happens even when you haven’t used the email for anything. This typically prompts you to ask questions like “How did these spammers get my email address?”. It’s almost like there are email detectors built to sniff out active email accounts. Now, I don’t know if this truly exists, but it sure seems like that sometimes. If you own a gmail address, then you must have received some spam emails from spammers and people who harvested your email and somehow found your email address. Thankfully, Gmail has an extremely effective anti-spam system. So, if you do things right, chances are that you may succeed in drastically reducing or prevent spam emails. If you, like me are interested in reducing the number of spam emails you get, here are a few ways to do so.
Tips to Preventing Spam in Gmail
1. Be Careful With Giving Out Your Email
This is pretty simple. Giving out your email to just about anyone, signing up at any website with the same email address will most surely generate spam emails. If you set up an email for business contacts and friends, please leave it as such. For instance, I have a gmail account strictly meant for work and a few contacts while I have another that’s meant for other uses like subscriptions and newsletters. I don’t give the former email address out unnecessarily as I don’t have the time to sift through junk just to find my most important emails. So, if you know that you will be subscribing to different newsletters, set up a different email address for that and set up another for the more important things.
2. Cancel Subscriptions
If you think about it, there are some newsletters, ezines and offers that you subscribed to and are no longer interested in. Sometimes, these can be the source of the spam emails in your gmail.com account. So, go through your email address right now and sort out the necessary subscriptions from the unnecessary ones. This is effective because these websites and newletters that you subscribe to, give out your address or sell them to mailing list companies. They also do ad swaps –they swap email lists so they can advertise to their different lists- to make more money or even build their lists.
3. Don’t Post Your Email on Public Forums and Websites
I have been guilty of this in past and had to eventually give up the email address. Posting your email address on highly trafficked websites or forums gives email harvesters and scrapers the opportunity to scrape and harvest your email from the websites. So, regardless of how important the issue might be, try not to post your email address in public forums and websites (at least not in the normal format). While it is possible that there are instances in which you have to do so, do it in a way that email harvesters will not be able to easily scrape it. For example, there was a time I couldn’t access my gmail account for an hour or two. I had to lodge my complaint on google’s public forum with my email address posted publicly. However, I posted the email in a way that would have made it difficult for email harvesters to scrape my email address. To do this, you can simply type your email address as xyz (AT) gmail dot com. That is more difficult for the email
4. Set Up the Spam Filter
Gmail has an effective anti-spam system. All you have to do is login to your gmail.com address, select the messages you’d like to report as spam and click Spam at the top. Gmail with automatically identify any subsequent mails from that email address as spam, and send it to the spam folder. If you keep getting repeated spam mails, you can easily setup a filter to instantly delete the email. To do this, click the Create a Filter link at the top close to the search buttons, type in the email in the From: bar (if there’s more, add the vertical bar (|) after the first mail and add another email address. Then, click Next, select the Delete it button under Choose action, click Create Filter. With this, you will be able to automatically delete all subsequent spam emails sent to you from the addresses you specified
