Ryan Kawamoto
Most of us have encountered spam in one form or another. In this article, I’m not talking about the beloved canned meat used to make musubi! Spam is unsolicited, usually commercial, messages sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places. Below, I’ll share ways to respond to spam and offer tips to keep your email inbox clean after you do.
How to Deal With Spam?
When you receive spam, do not click unsubscribe from a spam/phishing email. It’s best to instead report them as spam. All email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) have the option to report an email as spam.
With email tracking technology, scammers can tell when a recipient opens, clicks or engages with an email. They use this information to know which spam recipients are currently active and improve their scams. The more spam messages you open, the more you will receive. That’s why the best way to deal with spam is to delete or report it before opening it.
How to Identify Email Scams?
Before opening an email, the sender’s name and subject line of the email can already raise some red flags. Many of us have been duped, and more sophisticated spam messages require a more thorough look inside. Here are some red flags to look for:
- Requests for your personal information
- Sense of urgency
- Wrong organization logo and branding
- Typos and grammatical mistakes
- Unusual or weird sender email. Email not related to the organization.
- The “To” field might contain multiple recipients
- Impersonal or awkward greetings, such as “Dear customer” or “Dear Mr. account holder”
- Weird links not related to the organization
- Emails from organizations that you do not have an account with.
I Have Thousands of Emails in My Inbox. What Should I Do?
If your inbox is full to the brim with spam emails or otherwise, rest assured that you are not alone. According to recent data, the number of emails sent received worldwide in 2023 was 347.3 billion per day. This figure is projected to increase to 376.4 billion daily emails by 2025. With this large number of emails piling up daily in our inbox, keeping it clean and decluttered can be challenging.
For people with overflowing inboxes, email providers make it simple to delete emails in bulk and unsubscribe from any email list.
Here are a few techniques to clean up your email inbox while minimizing the number of relevant emails deleted:
- Delete emails sent more than two months ago
- Filter emails with keywords, select all and delete.
Another way to clean up your email is with email cleaner software. Although these tools can help clean up your inbox faster, they are often not free and might come with a learning curve.
When and How to Unsubscribe
Deleting emails from marketers is sometimes not enough. If you delete 10 emails today, you’ll still receive 10 more tomorrow. If the marketer is a business you are not interested in receiving emails from, then unsubscribing is the best way to go. You might have subscriptions to multiple email lists from the same marketer, in which case you’ll need to unsubscribe to each one of the email lists individually.
Once unsubscribed, you should no longer receive emails from that business. To unsubscribe from any email list, you only need to look for the unsubscribe button from a recent email and click it. The unsubscribe button is often at the top or bottom of the email.
Email Inbox Tips
Stay on top of keeping your email inbox clean by following these few tips:
- Invest time to clean up your email inbox
- Once the inbox is clean, try to keep the inbox count at zero. Whenever you check your email, read the important ones and delete the ones that are not before finishing the session
- Ask yourself if you’d like to receive emails from a website or business before giving away your email.
Remember Our Email Golden Rule
Just because a website has one good article doesn’t mean it deserves your email address.
For more information, we invite you to access our free weekly virtual programming online at www.seniorplanet.org or call our toll-free national hotline at (888) 713-3495. It’s open Monday -Friday from 9 a.m.-8 p.m. ET and Saturday from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. ET.
Ryan Kawamoto is a regional program manager for Older Adults Technology Services from AARP, a national nonprofit behind the award-winning Senior Planet program that brings together older adults to find ways to learn, work, create, exercise and thrive in today’s digital age. A version of this article was originally published on www.seniorplanet.org by Senior Planet’s resident “Techspert” Jonathan Ushindi Zaluke.
