3/17/20
9:00 am
How To Really Stop Getting Spam Email

There is a lot of bad advice out there when it comes to stopping junk email. People will tell you time-consuming ways to get marginally less spam. But there is really only one method that will solve the problem of getting too much spam. And oddly, few tech advisors talk about it.
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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me tell you the one thing that you can do that will really cut down the amount of spam email that you get.
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There are a lot of people out there with a lot of advice on how to reduce the amount of spam email that you get. But most of the advice is just wrong! There are things that people recommend that you could do that take a lot of effort that may only cut your spam a little bit if at all. I use email a lot and in my experiences only really one thing that you could do that really cuts back on the amount of spam you get. Most of the advice you get is bad. So first let's look at some common advice and why it is wrong.
The first thing is you'll get a lot of people telling you how to block email addresses. But this just won't cut out spam. The reason is is because spammers fake email addresses. It's not really coming from who it says it's coming from. If you get a piece of spam and you block that sender it's not really going to help at all. Maybe, maybe you might get one more piece of spam later that day from that same email address. But probably not. You'll probably never get a piece of email from that email address again. Therefore there's no point in blocking it. Over months and years you can build a huge list of blocked email addresses and it's still won't cutout spam because every piece of spam email that you get is going to come from a new random email address made-up by the spammer. It's not real. Blocking won't help.
You'll also see people talking about rules. Creating rules. You can create rules in the Mail app on your Mac. You can also create them in the email service that you're using. Rules don't really work either. Like let's say you block a certain word. So you say if the email contains that word then block it. Well, that's just one word. There are thousands of other words that you could also block. Are you going to take the time to build that list and then take the risk when people use that word jokingly in an email or something like that. Using email rules really doesn't work either but it certainly will take up a lot of your time to keep adding and maintaining a set of rules. It's not worth it.
There's also the old tool of local spam filters. These are spam filters that are on your Mac. The Mail app still has the same mail filters it's had for 15 or 20 years. Local filters don't work very well because all they're doing is trying to filter based on the content of the email or some other things and they are just not very effective and could lead to a lot of false positives. I haven't used the Mac's email filtering in more than a decade. Even if I did and it did effectively filter out a few spam emails that wouldn't help me if I happened to get the email on my iPhone first. Local email filters are a thing of the past. They never worked very well and definitely don't work well not.
Another thing people will talk about is reporting spam. Right. Different ways to report spam either by using a special button provided by your email provider or client or perhaps reporting it to the company that maybe the spam is trying to imitate. Maybe you get a piece of email that pretends to be from Apple, for instance. Should you report it to Apple? Well this takes a lot of effort on your part and it really doesn't help very much. There's so much spam out there that just you reporting your one email that you got really takes a lot of time on your part and it's just not really going to help the overall effort to reduce spam. It's just much easier to hit that Delete button immediately. Don't waste anymore time with a piece of junk email.
Lastly, you get a lot of people talking about how to hide your email address either using say an alternate version of your email address like your regular email address with a plus symbol and then a word after it. Every time you sign up for a different service have a slightly different email address. But in the end this won't cutout spam. You'll still get spam to those and they'll all come to your inbox. It maybe gives you a way to trace how the spammer might have gotten your email address. But it really doesn't help you in your goal of just getting less spam in your inbox.
As a matter of fact it could make things worse. You could end up getting more spam because you'll get it to your real email address and some of these alternatives as well. Once you get any spam to your real email address your email address is out there. You're going to get spam. The cat's out of the bag!
All right if all of that stuff doesn't work, what does work? Well there is one thing that will significantly reduce the amount of spam that you get and it's what I use. I rarely get any spam at all in my inbox. That is simply to choose a good email service provider. Email is really an internet service. A lot of  people talk about email as if the Mail app on their Mac or their iPhone is the email service. But that is just the client. It's just like the browser for viewing the web. It really comes down to the service that you're using. A good email service will filter spam at the server level and use the power of large numbers to figure out what is spam. When some service sends out a large amount of email to a lot of email addresses at the same service it's easy for the service to see that it is spam. For these services it's also worthwhile to keep track of bad servers, bad senders, and do some filtering based on content over a large scale and prevent that email from ever even going to your inbox.
Now you would think that almost any large email provider could do this. They could but they don't. The worst ones are the ISP email providers. If you're using an email address that's provided to you by your service, your cable modem, your DSL service, your mobile phone service, those are the worst at dealing with spam. They're just providing their email as kind of this add on. As something that's kind of expected of them. They don't really care very much about the quality of that service. They're going to let a lot of spam through or conversely maybe they're just going to filter out a ton of stuff and not care about false positives. So you've got to move away from your ISP's email service. 
You've got to move to one that's good at handling spam. So there are a lot of free email providers out there but not all of them handle spam well. For instance Yahoo doesn't  do a very good job of handling spam. There are a lot of other services like that. But there are two, that I think, are way above the rest. The first is Google also known as gmail. Google does a fantastic job filtering out spam email. They are such a big email service provider that it's easy for them to identify spam coming in and stop it before it goes to everybody's inboxes. These aren't just @gmail.com email addresses because you can use your own domain with Google. They have a premium service for that. That would use the same spam filtering as gmail.com does.
Now the second provider I found that is really good is a really convenient one for us Mac users. It's iCloud. iCloud.com seems to filter out spam email really well. I rarely ever get spam in my iCloud account and I've had it since it was an @mac.com email address. A lot of other people I've talked to using iCloud.com also report the same.
There is a third option and that's Microsoft. Currently it's outlook.com but a lot of accounts go all the way back to when they were hotmail.com email addresses. I hear that they do a pretty good job of filtering as well. But it seems they may go too far. I respond to a lot of people by email when they ask questions or just business email. It seems every time I respond to somebody and then I don't hear back from them until a few days later when I get an angry email asking why I haven't responded it's that they are using a hotmail.com email address. Then when I tell them that I did respond they usually say oh, it went to my junk mail filter. So I think they may do a good job of filtering but they may go too far. But it's probably a lot better than using Yahoo and definitely anything is better than using your ISP's email.
Now I understand there's reluctance of a lot of people to switch email services. If you've used the same email address for years then you may think about all the people that have it. You may think of all the services where you log on using that email address. But you don't have to just switch overnight. You can start using your iCloud or gmail email address now as you're primary one and still continue to get email at you're old accounts as well and gradually over the period of many months update people and update services to use iCloud or gmail as your main email address. So it's really not that hard to change your email address.
So that's it! That's my advice. If you really want to go and cut down on the amount of spam email that you get switch to either gmail or iCloud and you should see a significant difference. It's not 100%. You're still going to get some spam. I still occasionally hear from a gmail or iCloud user that gets a lot of spam for some reason. But for the most part the only real thing that you can do to cut down on the amount of spam email that you get is switch to one of those two services.
Comments: 42 Responses to “How To Really Stop Getting Spam Email”

Edward
6 months ago
Is .me the same as icloud. Com? I use me.com as my mail app
Comments: 42 Responses to “How To Really Stop Getting Spam Email”

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