by Stephen Cook

Created on: September 18, 2010

Great. You just checked your email to find that you have a whole new crop of spam emails. You’re really getting tired of receiving all these spam messages and you want to handle them properly so that you can prevent spam from reaching you in the future. But how?

There are two main ways that you should handle spam emails: you can report them as being spam or just delete them.

The best thing that you can do when you get a spam email is to mark it or report it as spam. By doing this you can better increase the chances that you won’t receive as much spam in the future. Some email services allow you to mark emails as spam so that the email service provider will be able to try and stop that kind of message from reaching your inbox. Even if your email account doesn’t function like this, then you should still be able to mark the email as spam so that the spam messages will at least be caught in your spam folder. If you want, you can delete the emails from your spam folder, or you can let the messages expire over time, meaning that they will automatically delete themselves when a certain amount of time has passed. Manually checking your spam folder from time to time can be a good idea in case some legitimate emails accidentally get caught in your spam folder, as this is known to happen to some people. But if everything turns out to be spam in your spam folder, then you can click “Delete All” and get rid of all the junk at once.

Another way that you can handle spam emails is to just delete them straight out of your inbox. If for some reason your email account doesn’t give you the option to mark the email as spam, then you can use this method. The downside of manually deleting messages from your inbox is that it will take longer than just emptying your spam folder, because you have to individually select each email to delete it. So if you have the option to mark emails as spam, then do that instead.

As a closing tip, remember that you should never open a spam email, even if you are trying to “unsubscribe” from the mailing list. Clicking on links in the email or replying to it will only invite more spam emails to come your way in the future. Don’t open the email even if it seems interesting or if it may be a real deal. If you didn’t sign up to receive the suspicious email, don’t know who the sender is, or don’t know anything about the email at all, then you should by no means open the email. Think smart and remember these tips and you can have victory in the fight against spam!

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