It seems like a reasonable request. Type in your email address to enter a contest, sign up for a newsletter, or score a discount coupon. What could go wrong? A couple of hundred trash emails every week. Once you hand over your email address, you can expect regular deliveries of ads, come-ons, and offers for things you would never consider buying. Those marketers will pass your address along to partners who clutter your inbox.
How do you avoid that crushing inbox overload? The best solution is to filter those messages to a separate account, where you can keep them away from more critical messages. I thought everyone did this; that is why members of LinkedIn only provide a Gmail email account to keep marketers like me from reaching them.
That requires, at a minimum, two email accounts. Keep your email address for regular correspondence with friends, family, and trusted merchants. Create a new, free email account (Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook.com) and use it for less essential stuff, like ads, newsletters, and promotions that you can scroll through when you feel like it (or ignore altogether). All these email accounts are free, but you must remember to visit them, or they will terminate.
Creating that new account is just the first step. After that step is complete, shunting all the unwanted emails from your primary account will take some time and effort, but the extra effort is worth it.
Here are a few things you can do right away to cut the spam load to a minimum.
1. Unsubscribe - Use the Unsubscribe button to take yourself off any mailing lists that are not useful. When you get a message from a company or organization you do not care about, scroll to the end and find the Unsubscribe link. Every legitimate marketer has one. Add the sender's address to your junk filter if that does not stop the flow. In Gmail, click the blue Unsubscribe button next to the sender's email address.
2. Change your address with senders - Change the address to your secondary account for mailing lists and other promotional stuff you want to continue receiving. Find a message from the sender and look for an option to change the email address they have on file for you. If there is no easy way, hit the unsubscribe button and then resubscribe (or don't!) using that secondary email address.
3. Use your new secondary address every time - Use it when you sign up for anything that might result in incoming junk mail. If a service turns out to be essential and worth promoting to the main account, you can use the change of address option here, too.
4. Aggressively filter - Set the spam filters on your primary account to their most aggressive setting. Then, monitor your Spam/Junk Mail folder for a month or two, using the Not Junk option to manage the false positives.
If all this sounds like work, it is. Those marketers are incredibly persistent. But in the long run, it is easier than dealing with an out-of-control mailbox daily. And possibly missing something important hidden between “Weight-loss” offers.
You can get far more sophisticated with this strategy by using filters, rules, and Gmail labels to organize messages into folders. But just creating a separate account and not giving your "real" email address to untrusted correspondents should cut the junk mail torrent in your primary inbox to a mere trickle.
Because you have established another email address, the phishers and other cyber actors will try to persuade you to open a file or click on a URL.
This article is shared at no charge and is for educational and informational purposes only.
Red Sky Alliance is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence Service organization. We provide indicators of compromise information via a notification service (RedXray) or an analysis service (CTAC). For questions, comments, or assistance, please get in touch with the office directly at 1-844-492-7225 or feedback@redskyalliance.com
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