The Battle Against Spam: 5 Easy Ways To Clean Up Your Inbox

Everyone’s familiar with spam email these days – some estimates say it accounts for over 90 percent of global email traffic.

Beyond just being annoying unwanted communication, some spam emails can pose a security risk, with phishing links, malware attachments, and more.

With promotional junk and unsolicited emails cluttering your inbox it can be tricky to see at a glance what emails actually matter.

So what’s the best way to deal with spam? Here are five ways to manage your inbox and deal with the issue.

5 Key Methods For Managing Spam

1. Leverage your email provider’s spam filter

Every email provider these days has a way to deal with spam automatically. Modern techniques use machine learning to analyse sender IP addresses and domains.

You can assist this machine learning by marking unwanted messages as spam, helping to clear your inbox in the future.

Rarely, legitimate emails can be caught in automatic spam filters. You can double check your spam folder every so often to see if legitimate communications have been misidentified – but in my experience it has been exceedingly rare.

2. Never engage with spam messages

Links in emails are often risky – especially if you don’t know the sender. It’s best practice to never click a link in an email unless you implicitly trust the source.

Attachments are also commonly a vector for malware. It’s best not to download any attachments unless you know and trust the sender.

“Unsubscribe” links in spam emails can often backfire – instead confirming to the sender that your email address is active, resulting in more spam.

3. Using custom filters and rules

Custom filters can be a great tool for sorting your inbox. You can categorise emails by sender, subject, keywords, and more, giving you folders to identify email from trusted sources.

You can use custom filters to block specific domains that commonly send you spam as well, automatically deleting messages before they can clog up your inbox.

An example of email filtering could be sorting mail by sender. You could have a folder each for subscription services, online shopping, social media updates, and local business communications.

4. Use separate email addresses for different purposes

Beyond using custom filters, you could consider using different email addresses for different purposes. For example, you could use one primary address that you keep private for important emails.

Add a secondary email address specifically for online shopping and service subscriptions and you’ve successfully gapped your main email address against a primary source of spam.

Email alias services can be an excellent tool for sorting email this way. Apple’s Hide My Email, DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection, Proton’s SimpleLogin, and more are examples of services that keep your primary email private.

These services essentially mask your real email address, so if they are compromised you can move important services to a new alias and safely delete the old one entirely.

5. Protect your email address

Proactively keeping your email address private is another key to combating spam.

Spammers can collect your email address from sources like social media, forums, websites, customer lists and prior data breaches.

These aggregated email lists are often passed on to other spammers, perpetuating the issue.

It’s best practice to avoid posting your email address publicly, and to be very selective about what companies and services you share your email address with.

If you’re willing to go the extra mile for privacy, taking a look at the privacy policy of services you sign up for can give you an insight into whether the service can be trusted with your email address.

Use these points to combat spam

A combination of these strategies will keep your inbox relatively safe and free from spam, while helping you sort important emails from unimportant ones.

Some providers like Proton make it easy to follow these best practices. You’ll want to find a provider with email masking for signing up to online services, email aliases for use with different organisations, and robust security that you can trust.