Nobody wants spam and unwanted e-mail messages. They are quite annoying and unfortunately sometimes slip past the control of Mail and your provider. The unwanted e-mails will then not end up in the ‘unwanted advertising’ mailbox, but simply in your inbox.
Everyone has probably experienced it before, companies that supposedly send an email to check something. This includes e-mails from your bank, Apple, PayPal, etc. If you click on a link in the e-mail, you will ultimately end up on a fraudulent website. But also spam messages with advertisements for whiter teeth, strange requests, fun trips and too-good-to-be-true offers.
The question is of course: how do I get rid of spam emails and ensure that they stop. Unfortunately, the answer to that is anything but satisfactory. It is quite difficult to prevent spam mail, but we will give you tips on how to reduce it.
Prevent spam emails
Prevention is better than cure, but unfortunately it is not easy. In most cases, spamming starts after your email address appears in a spam database. This is a file full of ‘leaked’ email addresses. There are several ways to get on such a spam list. Hacked accounts is one of them, in the past several websites have been hacked from which they have stolen the login details of users. This includes accounts from Dropbox, Yahoo, Duolingo, bitly, etc. So if you ever had such an account during the period of the hack, there is a good chance that your email address ended up in a spam list. On the website haveibeenpwned you can check this.
But that is not the only way, this can also be caused by newsletters. Especially in the past, it sometimes happened that some commercial companies sold your email address to other newsletter generators, a kind of public mailbox.
This all sounds quite scary, but this is not even the biggest cause. You often end up in a spam list after you leave your email address lying around publicly somewhere on the internet. For example, in a response to a forum, digital business card, your personal website, etc. It is extremely important that you never publish your email address on the internet so that everyone can view it. Spam robots can register this email address and use it to spam.
If you think you can outsmart the bots by replacing the @ with [a] or something similar, unfortunately it makes no sense, this is also recognized. We at appletips therefore always try to adjust comments that contain an email address, so that this is not visible to third parties.
Stop SPAM
Now that you know how spammers get your email address, you naturally want to know how to stop this annoying spam. Unfortunately, this is almost impossible and you will notice the more you do, the worse it gets. However, you can ensure that you will receive less spam in the long run. You have to make the spammer believe that your email address no longer exists. You do this by ignoring the email and straight away to delete.
Steps you sure NOT has to do
- Open spam mail: when you open the email, images are loaded from the spammer’s server. These have a unique ID, if this is opened the spammer will know that your email address is active and will spam even more.
- Sign out: What you should definitely not do is click on the unsubscribe or unsubscribe link, otherwise the spammer will know that your address is active and will send even more spam.
Delete spam emails immediately
If you have received a spam email, you will usually immediately recognize it by the subject. Since you should not open the email, it is best to delete it immediately or move it to the ‘Advertising’ mailbox. On an iPhone or iPad you do this by swiping from right to left on the message in the inbox list. Then choose ‘Delete’ or tap the ‘More’ option and then choose ‘Move to Commercials’.
On a Mac you can delete an email directly by clicking on the email in the overview with a secondary click (right mouse button) and choosing ‘delete’ or choosing ‘Move to ‘Advertising”.
Outsmart spammers
Using smart rules and automations you can also automatically move spam to advertising or delete it, just follow the tips below to do this.
- Immediately delete annoying spam emails via iCloud
- Outsmart spammers on your iPhone, iPad or Mac
- Overview of current/active phishing emails
Hide IP address
On an iPhone, iPad or Mac you can use ‘Privacy Protection in Mail’. The option ensures that your IP address is invisible, so that senders cannot link it to other online activity or determine your location.
The content is loaded anonymously so spammers have less opportunity to track your activity. In addition, senders cannot see if and when you opened their email. As a result, the receiver is quickly seen as ‘inactive’. This may result in fewer spam emails. In the featured article below, we explain step by step how to enable privacy protection in Mail.
Additional application for Apple Watch owners
Do you have an Apple Watch Series 3 or newer? The Watch can then automatically open received emails when you receive them via a notification. That is of course useful, but in spam emails the images are also loaded. That is of course not the intention as we just ‘learned’.
Therefore, it is best to disable the automatic loading of images. You do this via the Apple Watch app on your iPhone â–¸ My Watch â–¸ Mail â–¸ Disable the ‘Always load material directly’ option. When you now receive an email with an image, you can load it by tapping the appropriate button.
Less spam with these tips
If you follow the tips above, you will notice that you will receive less spam over time. Unfortunately, spamming will not stop completely soon, it is possible that over time spammers will become active again to check whether your email address is still being used. Then it is also a matter of immediately removing it and ignoring as much as possible, only then can you reduce it.
Do you have any more tips to prevent spam? Then share them in the comments, so we can help each other.