Stop spam emails

Spam emails are the bane of the modern workday.

Not only do they add clutter and chaos to your digital workspace, but they also pose a serious cyber safety risk as spam emails are one of the most common ways that viruses and malware are deviously spread around the internet. 

If you’re a business owner who prioritizes organization, tight cybersecurity, and high team productivity, it is in your best interest to invest in some anti-spam software or cyber safety education for your employees. 

You need to ensure that your employees aren’t going to fall prey to spam emails that are riddled with viruses or malware that could compromise the security of private company or client data.

To learn how to stop spam emails permanently, continue reading or give Emerald City Solutions a call for a personal consultation from one of our IT specialists. 

Here at Emerald City Solutions, we have been helping business owners in Washington State optimize their digital workspaces and productivity through quality IT infrastructure and anti-spam programs. Are IT services enable you to improve security, educate employees, and how to get rid of spam emails permanently.

Before diving into how to stop email spam, here’s a quick review of why email spam blocking is so crucial (both for personal and business email accounts). 

1. Spam is a security risk 

While it’s often easy to identify spam in your inbox, the danger of spam is that it’s not always obvious. Often, spam emails appear to be from someone you know or a colleague within your company.

These incognito spam emails are usually the most dangerous, as they’ve taken the trouble to mask themselves because they’re desperate for you to open them. Of course, once you do (and especially if you click on any links or attachments), pandora’s box is opened and a slew of viruses, malware, and spyware quickly worm their way deep into your hard drive. 

Beyond damage to your IT infrastructure, these threats can also steal sensitive personal information (e.g. social security numbers, credit card information, passwords, and website login data), as well as customer data (e.g. home addresses, credit card numbers). 

In today’s marketplace, one of the most damaging things that can happen to your company’s reputation is a failure to keep customer data safe. Learn how to stop getting spam emails now so that you don’t have to apologize to clients later. 

2. Spam hurts productivity 

While not all spam carries viruses, even harmless spam can hurt your revenue or personal productivity. If you don’t figure out how to permanently stop spam emails, you and your employees will continually be buried under countless email clutter. 

Manually sorting through spam requires precious time. Installing a spam filter or other spam blocker you drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to clear out your inbox every day. 

3. Waiting to block spam can throw your company out of compliance 

Many industries must follow strict regulations when it comes to client data storage and use. Failing to install a spam filter may be a breach of regulation. 

Keep your company compliant and keep your data secure by learning how to spam email today, which, is what I’m going to teach you right now!

As a business owner, it’s important to appropriately deal with spam emails to enhance your company’s productivity and cybersecurity. 

If you are looking for easy ways to stop spam from infiltrating your inbox, here are 6 ways to stop spam emails for free.

If you have additional questions about how to stop spam emails for good, give Emerald City Solutions a call to speak with an IT professional.

1. Optimize Your Filter

Rather than simply deleting spam emails as they come through, select the offending email and let your mail service know that the email is spam. For example, Gmail has a helpful little Report Spam button that may be used at times like these. 

This lets your mail service know that those particular emails are spam and helps your filter become more intuitive so that it can weed out the spam next time on its own next time. 

2. Check Your Spam Folder

Another aspect of optimizing your built-in spam filter is by going through your spam folder a couple of times a week and letting your email program know when it mistakes a legitimate email as spam. 

If you’re using Gmail, select the safe email and click the Not Spam button to remove a misplaced email from your spam folder and help your filter become more intuitive in the future. 

3. Get an Email Hiding Application

There are several ways to hide your email address in order to eliminate spam emails. You can do a quick Google search to find out which email hiding applications are free. 

If you’re willing to make a small investment to reduce the number of spam emails you receive, many email hiding applications have a trial run of their application which you can do to see if you like it before making a monetary investment.

4. Hire an IT Service to Help

An IT service can provide you with anti-spam software to help you and your team stop getting unwanted spam emails. 

Here at Emerald City Solutions, we have a trained team of IT professionals who are ready to help you optimize your digital workspaces through reduced spam and high-tech anti-spam programs. 

We’d be more than happy to run a boot camp for your employees about the importance of being cautious when it comes to spam emails. Our IT technicians can help your team learn how to identify spam emails and train their built-in email filters to discard unwanted spam emails. 

Whether you need educational IT assistance or an intuitive anti-spam program, give Emerald City Solutions a call today to learn more about our IT services.

5. Use a Disposable Email Address

To keep your work and home emails spam-free, have a disposable email address that you use whenever you are required to enter your email address or when signing up for newsletters. This will keep all non-work-related emails in one spot, which is neither your primary nor work email inboxes. 

You may simply delete your disposable email address once you’ve finished using it and create another one when the need arises for another throwaway email address. 

6. Remove Your Email Address From Online

Another simple way to decrease the number of spam emails that you receive is by removing your email address from anywhere that is publicly seen.

If you have a business website or LinkedIn, make sure that you take down your email address and only put it back up when you have an email hiding program installed. This will allow potential clients to send you email inquiries without making your email address public. This ensures that people can contact you when necessary but that your email address isn’t readily accessible for spammers to get a hold of.

Figuring out how to get rid of spam in Gmail is a pretty straightforward process.

Gmail is equipped with a spam filter that allows you to choose to filter emails from specific addresses or emails containing certain words. Built-in Gmail filter tools are a convenient and free way to stop unwanted emails and train your email program to identify and deal with spam before it reaches you. 

Follow these five steps to learn how to stop spam emails in Gmail:

1. Click the settings wheel in the top right corner.
2. When the drop-down menu appears, click the Settings tab.
3. Once in Settings, go to Filters And Blocked Addresses.
4. Select Create A New Filter to block specific email addresses or to create a filter that flags emails with certain spam-like language.
5. After you click Create New Filter, select the Delete option so that all spam emails go directly to your Delete folder. Keep in mind that emails will remain in your trash for 30 days, so if you think that an email has incorrectly gone to the trash, you can always check and retrieve it. 
6. Make sure that you check the destination folder where you are directing spam emails to go once or twice a week. This will ensure that no important emails accidentally get deleted and will also help you train your filter better to identify true spam emails.

While companies are obligated to include an unsubscribe link so as to not spam people on their subscribe list, occasionally, you will encounter a spam email without an unsubscribe link or with a broken unsubscribe link.

This is a frustrating scenario to find yourself in, to say the least. So here are three steps for how to stop spam emails without an unsubscribe link.

Request to Be Unsubscribed

If it’s a newsletter that you signed up for in the past or one that you know to be safe, you may reply to the sender of the email and ask them to unsubscribe you from the mailing list.

If this doesn’t work, try method number two for unsubscribing from an unwanted email list. 

Redirect Spam Emails

If you are not able to request the sender to unsubscribe you, redirect all of the emails from that particular address to your spam or trash folder. If you are using Gmail, refer to the directions above on how to stop spam emails in Gmail.

Block the Sender

The final solution for how to stop spam emails without an unsubscribe link is to block the sender. If you’d rather not deal with the emails going to a different folder, simply block the address of the sender. 

This will prevent the sender from sending you any more spam emails in the future.

Here are three of the most frequently asked questions about how to block unwanted emails:

1. Do Spammers Know if I’ve Opened an Email?

Not always.

Although some email programs will send read receipts, this isn’t universal across all email programs. 

Spammers may occasionally have an email tracking program that will tell them if the recipient has opened their email.

2. Is Email Scanning Important?

Yes.

When it comes to working emails, it’s important to have some kind of email scanning software that scans potential spam emails for malware. Having scanning software will protect your work computer from hidden viruses and malware that are sometimes in spam emails. 

3. How Do I Know Which Anti-Spam Program to Use?

Consult the list below for some common anti-spam programs that business owners use to reduce the amount of spam they receive.

If you have additional questions about how to choose an anti-spam program, give Emerald City Solutions a call today so our IT experts can point you towards the ideal anti-spam program for your unique situation. 

Here’s a quick list of some of the best anti-spam programs for business owners: 

• SpamTitan
• Mailwasher
• MX Guarddog
• ZERO SPAM
• SPAMfighter

4. What Are The Perks Of Using an Anti-Spam Software? 

Some of the unique features of anti-spam programs include: 

• The ability to automatically quarantine spam emails. Anti-spam programs filter your email as it comes in, sorting safe email into your main inbox and sending suspected spam directly to a quarantine folder. Usually, quarantine folders hold spam for 30 days before automatically deleting them. This gives you time to review the spam folder and save any safe emails before deletion. 
• Effectively block spam. Anti-spam software usually scans email subject lines and email body text in order to determine if an email is spam. You can help your filter improve it’s hit rate by updating its blacklist of words, phrases, and email addresses. Any email containing those elements will be automatically directed to your quarantine folder. 
• Maintain a whitelist. In addition to your personal spam blacklist, spam-blocking programs give you access to a whitelist where you can jot down all your safe email addresses. This ensures that important work emails are never accidentally sent to quarantine or deleted. 

Anti-virus filters. Some anti-spam programs also come with anti-virus capabilities, scanning all incoming emails and attachments to ensure that you don’t accidentally click on a corrupted file or dangerous attachment.

Did you know that spam emails account for more than 50% of all sent emails? This means that as a business owner, you are guaranteed to encounter spam emails every single day.

When teams are uneducated or unaware of the dangers of spam emails, this can lead to database breaches, lost or stolen information, and client mistrust.

For you, as a business owner, to protect your employees, company, and clients, you need to take spam education into your own hands. Your employees must understand the gravity of cybersecurity and can identify spam emails before without opening them up.

To make sure that everyone within your company is all on the same page and understands the necessary caution that should be taken when handling spam emails, they must be educated about the dangers of spam emails.

If you’d like help educating your team about the dangers of spam email, please contact Emerald City Solutions. Our IT professionals are also passionate teachers that take pride in helping employees around the Northwest learn how to recognize and mitigate the risk of spam email.

It’s estimated that the average office employee spends over 60% of their workday weeding through their email, sending emails, and deleting spam. 

That is an astounding amount of time spent away from doing the real work that keeps your business running. 

And considering that 50% of all email sent is spam, it’s no surprise that employees spend countless hours every week on the simple task of managing their email inbox. 

Fortunately, by following all the tips above, you can learn how to get rid of spam emails permanently. And if you need professional help to optimize your spam filters or to help you choose the best spam software for your inbox, please give Emerald City Solutions a call today. 

Our team of IT technicians would love to help you learn how to stop unwanted emails from infiltrating your inbox and get you all set up with an anti-spam program that protects you and your business. 

Whether you need IT support, would like to inquire about our anti-spam program, or want an IT specialist to run a mini-boot camp at your office to educate your employees about good IT hygiene, contact Emerald City Solutions today. 

A spam-free inbox is right around the corner.