Spam Is on the Menu: How to Keep Your Inbox Clean and Secure

Introduction

Hey guys, I'm Neadom Tucker, and if you are like me, unfortunately, spam is a part of our life. Now I'm not talking about the spam that we eat, I'm talking about the spam in your email folder. Stay tuned to see how you can keep that cleaned up and save yourself a lot of frustrations.

Hey guys, I'm Neadom Tucker, owner of Kotori Technologies, and today we're going to talk about spam. Spam is on the menu. No, we're not talking about the canned spam, we're talking about spam in your inbox. How do I get rid of it? How do I stop it from happening? How do I keep my sanity?

Stop Filling Out Forms

The first thing that we can take a look at is, honestly, stop filling out those forms. I know this sounds really simple, but all these Amazon gift cards, and all of these, “hey, this white paper for that,” and “this document for this,” and “hey, do this”—these are conversions for websites.

Getting your email address, having access to you personally in your mailbox, being able to talk to you because you want to look at this design sheet or whatnot—think about these things when you give out your email address. You're signing up for spam, basically.

Make sure that you're paying attention to what you're using. A lot of times these larger organizations, like the ones offering $50 gift cards, will then take that email and potentially sell it or use it for other purposes to make money. They list services and gather that information to sell. So be careful with that.

Unsubscribe from Spam Emails

If you're getting these spam email messages and you don't want to get them anymore, a lot of these systems will have an unsubscribe link. Click on the unsubscribe link. Sometimes you may have to do it two or three times because you may be in multiple systems or on different lists.

If you see an unsubscribe link or an opt-out button, click on that and opt out. That’s going to reduce some spam. Typically, take a look at that once a quarter. Go through your mailbox, let the spam come in, delete it, and then clean it up manually.

Use Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Services

The second thing to look at is using an anti-spam or anti-virus service for email. This is one of the layers of security we’ve talked about in some of our videos. One of the first layers for email security is scanning for spam before the email gets delivered into your organization.

What happens when spam gets delivered is it’s rated on a score or scaling factor—one to ten, or whatever the engine uses. If the message is heavily spam-related, containing keywords or HTML, it’ll be tagged as spam. Depending on your organization’s spam settings, it may be allowed in, quarantined, or blocked altogether.

You want to make sure you have an application in place to filter those emails. The beauty of that is you can customize what you want to receive. Maybe you don’t want newsletters or sales emails marked as spam. Maybe you’re a big online shopper and want to see deals from Amazon, Walmart, JC Penney, or Dillard’s. You can choose what to allow.

Conclusion

If your goal is to get rid of spam, stop signing up for junk and get a service that helps protect you and your organization. A lot of malware and viruses come from spam every day. It’s often the first way hackers get into your infrastructure—offering gift cards, fake invoices, and more.

So be safe out there. Today we covered two things: