Friday Five: Five ways to reduce spam in your inbox

Lately I have been noticing a larger amount of spam and unwanted emails cluttering up my smart phone and my inbox.  I thought I would do a week long experiment to track the percentage of emails that I wanted to read versus the ones that I don't have time to mess with.  The results surprised even me:

Monday:  76% of the emails I got were Junk or unwanted

Tuesday: 76% of the emails that I got were Junk or unwanted

Wednesday:  93.1% of the emails that I got were junk or unwanted

Thursday: 94% of the emails that I got were junk or unwanted

Friday:  82% of the emails that I got were junk or unwanted

Saturday:  83% of the emails that I got were junk or unwanted

Sunday:  82% of the emails that I got were junk or unwanted

This meant that the average for the week was 83.71% junk or unwanted emails that were cluttering up my inbox! 

What was so surprising for me was that I had spam filters in place so this is what was slipping through the cracks...

So I did some research and here are Five ways in addition to having a spam filter installed that can help to reduce the amount of Spam and Unwanted emails in your inbox:

1.  Be careful who you give your email address out to.  I keep a free gmail address that I give out to mailing lists, newsletters, etc... so that those items to do not clog up my business email.

2.  Set up folders and rules for your inbox.  You can set up a folder for newsletters and items to read later.  You can even specify that certain address go straight to the trash box instead of your inbox.  If you need detailed steps on setting up folders and rules click here.

3.  Email clients like Outlook are prone to being spammed so experts recommend installing a free email client like Thunderbird 3 that has stronger spam protection.

4.  Report spam emails to sites like Spam Cop or the National Fraud Information Center

5.  If you have a website, use a contact form for people to contact you with rather than giving out your email address.  Spammers have computer programs that do nothing but scan the internet for email addresses on websites to spam. 

In the week since I followed some of these steps I have seen a decrease in the amount of unwanted email in my inbox by more than 50%!  Now that is more like it.