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: 38 Responses to “How To Really Stop Getting Spam Email”

Edward

3 weeks ago

Is .me the same as icloud. Com? I use me.com as my mail app

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Edward: @mac.com and @me.com are both older versions of @icloud.com. You should be able to receive email at both @me.com and @icloud.com with the name characters before the @.

edward

3 weeks ago

Gary:
I do get emails from both I cloud.com and me.com without difficulty. Is the incident of spam less with either of these two emails interchangeably?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Edward: They are the same service, same email location. No difference.

Don Palmer

3 weeks ago

Over the last few years, we have been phasing out Yahoo in favor of gmail. If we remove the Yahoo mail boxes, will that remove Yahoo, once and for all, or is addition action required? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Don: You’ll need to remove those account from System Preferences, Internet Accounts (You can get to it in the Mail app in Mail, Accounts). The great thing is you can still check your Yahoo email through their website if you occasionally need to.

Don Palmer

3 weeks ago

How remove Yahoo Account from iPhone 6? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Don: Settings app. Passwords & Accounts. Choose the account and then Delete.

Don Palmer

3 weeks ago

Gary, you are the greatest! Yahoo has already been deleted. Thanks for your precise directions.

Caroline

3 weeks ago

Does using an email client, as opposed to using either gmail or iCloud online, make any difference to whether any spam gets through? I’d assume not, given that the filtering is done by the email services themselves. So… is there any benefit to using an email client? Gmail seems so comprehensive in what it lets you do, with signatures, labels and so on, that I wonder if using Mail or Spark or whatever is worth it.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Caroline: No, the Mail app shows you your inbox just like the website. So it is the same. Using an app like Mail can be nicer for composing and organizing your messages, and also seeing emails from multiple accounts at the same time like many of us do.

Rocky

3 weeks ago

I agree with you that gmail does a good job at significantly reducing spam. My old email provider was the cable provider. I still have my old email address but I forward it all to gmail and then they filter the spam. You may want consider adding this comment to your presentation. This way you do not have to get rid of old email and many users would like this.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Rocky: I still highly recommend that you get rid of your old ISP email address. See https://macmost.com/five-reasons-not-to-use-your-isps-email-service.html This should be easy for you now that you have a Gmail address. Just start switching things over and eventually nothing real is coming to your old ISP email.

Ian Waddington

3 weeks ago

Gary, great advice, as an iCloud account user I agree that spam seems to be very low. Another thing I like about iCloud is that I can use aliases. This allows me to have one or more different alias addresses on my main apple ID which I can delete and change if I want without ever revealing my actual Apple ID to anyone. Also, this appear as one account in the mail app which also keeps things tidy.

Caroline

3 weeks ago

Thanks, Gary. As I thought! Yep, I tend to use Spark as a clear and unfussy way of seeing emails from Gmail and iCloud accounts in a single Inbox.

Dara Hogan

3 weeks ago

Great piece Gary. I’ve been doing this (with Gmail) for years without realising that it was the optimum solution. Incidentally, is “Goggle” instead of “Google” a typo or am I missing something? Many thanks!

Gene

3 weeks ago

I used gmail in the past but switched to iCloud about a year ago. They both handle(d) spam well. I moved away from Google as I did not like being their “product”.

Peter

3 weeks ago

Gary, so how do I switch to iCloud and when you say spam do you mean email from say Costco or Wayfair or Homedepot?

Ray

3 weeks ago

Gary,
Great presentation. Do I have to turn on the spam filter at iCloud ?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Peter: That’s not spam. Spam is unsolicited email. So junk mail you get from people or companies you have never done business with. You can switch email by simply getting a new email address and starting to use it. Tell others to use it. Slowly switch your online accounts to use the new email address instead of the old one. See https://macmost.com/changing-email-addresses.html

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Ray: No. iCloud does this on their server. There is nothing you need to turn on.

Steve

3 weeks ago

I use iCloud.com and it’s great. So I totally agree with your evaluation of it.

My problem is that mail I’m receiving mail from a Yahoo Group email account that was legit at one time but has become Spam. Because I closed my Yahoo account when they were being hacked, I cannot access the Yahoo Group itself to “unsubscribe” (Yahoo doesn’t recognize my user name and/or PW). I’ve tried to contact Yahoo directly, but they won’t / don’t help. How could I block emails from that specific Yahoo group?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Steve: Wow, that’s a bit of a problem. How is the email even getting to you if that Yahoo account is closed? Can you just set up a rule at iCloud.com to have that email sent directly to the trash?

Steve

3 weeks ago

Thanks Gary — Yes, based on Apple’s advice, that’s what I’ve done. So the email does go directly either to Junk or Trash (not sure why it goes one place one day and another on another). That minimizes the pain of having it in my Inbox.

I agree that it doesn’t make sense that if my Yahoo account is closed I still receive the emails. But that’s Yahoo for you …. (Grrrrrrrr….)

Gonser, Sr Tom

3 weeks ago

To clarify: if still using …@mac.com is it necessary to change to …@icloud.com?

Lindy

3 weeks ago

Steve: How about going back to Yahoo to log in… click on “forgot password” … once they send a new one… you can go in and make the changes. It’s may be worth a shot. I had a similar problem with dumping Facebook. Too long ago to remember the details of that experience ;-D

Jasper Robinson

3 weeks ago

Good points from Ian & Gene.

2 more thoughts:
1. I use a server-side rule in Outlook to move work e-mails that are from external domains to a folder. I check this—along with other mail-rule folders—*before* going to my Inbox. This makes it easy to pick up spam/phishing emails.
2 1Password allows you to find specific email addresses that you use for services. This makes it easy to transition from, say, ISP to iCloud if you’re making the move.

Jasper Robinson

3 weeks ago

3. I assume that some spam gets out by generating likely email addresses from common names and known email domains. I use a password generator to make crazy iCloud aliases (Ian’s tip, above), which are unlikely to be guessed.
4. Maybe adding “.”/”+” in your email address to make it unique, *could* allow you to act. If your name is in that address, it’s covered by law in Europe’s GDPR as personal data. That said, I’ve never noticed it in my spam (maybe edited out?).

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Tom: You can keep using @mac.com if you like it better. Doesn’t matter.

Jim Terrinoni

3 weeks ago

You answered a question I had, yet hadn’t bothered to ask. I have spent many hours (days/months) creating rules and trying to stop spam that Time Warner/Spectrum claims they will stop – and they don’t. Your solution to go to stop doing the rules and change email providers was something I knew about yet your rational gave me a better comfort level.

Brian Marston

3 weeks ago

You did not address Google scanning and monetizing the content of your e-mail correspondence. Is this just urban legend?

-Brian M

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Brian: Previously, Gmail has used the content of your email (an algorithm, not a person) to customize the ads you see at the Gmail site. I’m not sure if this is what you mean. It wasn’t like they were selling your content. But they stopped that in 2017 anyway.

Sherry R

3 weeks ago

I created an icloud email account for personal use but I need another one for my husband and especially for our business. I read you can only have one icloud account. Is this an accurate statement?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 weeks ago

Sherry: You should only have one iCloud account per person, yes. So your husband should get his own. For your business you should get another email account (if you really want), maybe something with Gmail but your best option is to have your own business web domain and an email address there.

Jonathan

4 days ago

Hi Gary. I sort of have the opposite issue. I have my own domain and forward everything to my iCloud address. the problem I have is I still have to look at the original mail account (usually by Outlook, to my domain provider) as some of my real mail does not show on iCloud. This includes my credit card companies and some other statements. I have to manually forward them to my iCloud account. Is there a way to approve an address, domain? I have tried adding to contacts. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

4 days ago

Jonathan: Is it that your original mail account isn’t forwarding them? Or is it that iCloud is sending them to spam? With a problem like that, I wouldn’t do this at all. I would just have both accounts in the Mail app and check your original Mail account directly. Since you have your own domain, you should have better controls for spam through that service. If not, then take your domain to another service.

Jonathan

3 days ago

Not sure if its not forwarding, or iCloud not accepting. iCloud NOT sending to the spam folder just never shows anywhere . Mostly CC accounts bank info etc.???

Gary Rosenzweig

3 days ago

Jonathan: Sounds like those are not being forwarded. You may just want to change those account emails to use your iCloud account and skip the forwarding. Or, stop doing the forwarding and just access that account normally. Or, use a different service for that account.

How To Really Stop Getting Spam Email

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