A true story about my fight against spam email

Anyone who’s on the internet knows what email spam is and its become such a large scale issue that we start to become numb to it. Sorta like a dog that loses a leg. Yes the problem is there, but he starts ignoring it so much that he eventually forgets about it and just goes about his daily life. BUT HE’S STILL MISSING A LEG!

We all deal with it: we check our email box and sort through all the random bullshit. We don’t even think about it anymore. Just read, delete, read, remove, skip, delete, remove, OH LOOK AN EMAIL FROM MY FRIEND! Especially if you have a smart phone that gives you email notifications. Its like it never shuts up.

Many of us have public email accounts, such as Gmail or AOL or Yahoo or whatever. Yes they have “spam filters” but they don’t quite make the cut. They do a decent job, but our inboxes are still cluttered with worthless junk.

I finally had enough.

Just over a year ago I started fighting back and it’s paid off. It took a long time before I started seeing any decent results, a few months actually, but over time it began to get more and more apparent that what I had been doing really worked.

What did I do? It was simple: I started opting out of the emails. Believe it or not, 50% of the spam email you get is from legitimate sites that you signed up for and checked the silly little box that said “send me emails about site updates” or something along those lines. You’ll have to handle them on a one-by-one basis. Just login to the site, go to your options or contact preferences and opt out of the newsletter emails or whatever else they want to send you.

Another large portion of your emails come from mailing lists that you can unsubscribe from. Just scourer the email (usually at the very top or very bottom) and find the “click here to unsubscribe”. Its normally really small and often colored in a manner that hides it, but its there. Sometimes you have to click it and follow a set of instructions to complete the process but trust me, its worth it. PROTIP: some of these will require you to unsubscribe a few times before they get the point, but it will eventually work.

After you’ve taken care of those two categories, the remainder will be emails you’ll have to really work at. Some of them you can Google and research and find the sender, or you can try replying to the email its sent from. I really can’t give any advice on that except to just keep trying.

After time you’ll really start to see a big difference. In fact, the remainder of the shit that gets sent to me ends up getting caught by Gmail’s spam filter. I can stand here today tell you in all honesty: I have no spam email in my inbox

Just take the time to unsubscribe and opt out of emails, watch out for the checkboxes when you sign up for sites, and most importantly… DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT