It is a reality of our modern lives that our personal data is continually sold to third parties who use that data to try to sell us products and influence our opinions. Even the most careful of consumers will invariably end up on various marketing lists and have an inbox overflowing with marketing materials. So, what are you to do?
Have more than one email address
One great way to make sure your work inbox stays clean is to set up a free email account with an email service like Google and use that email address for personal purchases, personal communication, and any subscriptions that you opt into. Creating accounts with various vendors as part of your online purchasing activity will undoubtedly lead to spam email from that vendor and any vendors they share or sell your information to. While your personal email address may end up with more emails than you would like, at least your work inbox will remain relatively clean.
Some users may balk at the idea of having to check two different emails. However, you can always have a secondary mailbox forwarded to one central mailbox with the advantage that if those secondary emails become too much, you can delete that secondary mailbox and stop the flow of data where if all emails are sent to one address, you don’t have that option.
Unsubscribe
All legitimate marketing materials (think Macy’s) you receive must, by law, have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Unsubscribing from several email lists can be time consuming but if it truly has the effect of reducing the number of emails you receive, then it is worth it. However, please note that not all senders are created equal and while large and legitimate retailers will have a secure way to capture and honor your unsubscribe requests, smaller organizations or retailers may not have that system in place, and you will continue to receive emails from them. Hackers even use the unsubscribe link to attack you. If you are going to take the time to unsubscribe, make sure it is from a legitimate entity.
Mark emails as spam in your inbox
One of the most effective ways to ensure specific emails do not clog your inbox, is to mark the email as spam and block the sender. You will never see emails from that sender again, and if enough people mark their emails as spam, they will be blacklisted and be unable to do mass marketing emails in the future. Please note that unfortunately the true spammers are quite clever and send from different email addresses. You will have to flag/block each sender.
While all email services have spam filters, there is only so much the filters can do. If you set the spam controls as too aggressive, you may miss legitimate emails. If you set the controls too permissive, you might let a lot of spam through. While there is no easy answer, the tips above should help minimize the amount of junk email you have to process on a daily basis. If you have any questions or need help creating rules in your inbox to deal with spam, please reach out to our team at support at hybridge.com.
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