Guides → How to stop email spam
How to stop email spam before it starts
Filters are damage control. If your inbox is drowning, the useful question is not which filter to add but how your address got onto so many lists in the first place — and what you can stop doing today.
Where your address actually leaks
Spam rarely starts with someone guessing your address. It starts with you typing it somewhere. The usual sources, roughly in order of how much traffic they generate:
- Gated content. Whitepapers, price lists, discount codes, sample files. Frequently the entire point of the gate.
- Data breaches. A site you signed up for years ago gets breached, and the address list circulates permanently.
- Deliberate resale. Legal in many places if buried in a privacy policy nobody reads.
- Captive Wi-Fi portals. Airports, malls, cafes. Almost pure list-building.
- Public posting. An address in a forum signature or on a personal site gets scraped within days.
The prevention layer
The highest-leverage habit is deciding, before you type an address, whether you will ever need mail from this sender again.
If the honest answer is no — you want one file, one code, one download — a disposable address does the job and closes the loop permanently. The sender gets a working address, you get your file, and nothing reaches your real inbox now or in three years when they sell the list.
If the answer is yes, or even maybe, use a real address or an alias. Disposable mail is deleted on a schedule and is not recoverable, so it is a poor choice for anything you might need to reset a password on later.
Tracing a leak
If you want to know who sold you out, use a distinct address per signup. With an alias provider, generate a new alias for each service. With a Gmail-style plus-address, use you+storename@gmail.com — weaker, because the plus-part is trivially stripped, but free and better than nothing.
When spam arrives addressed to one of those, you have your answer, and with a real alias you can kill it in one click.
Cleaning up what is already there
- Unsubscribe from legitimate senders. Real companies honour it and are legally obliged to.
- Mark actual spam as spam. Do not unsubscribe from senders you never signed up with — you are only confirming the address works.
- Filter aggressively. Route anything containing "unsubscribe" that is not from a known sender straight to a folder you review weekly.
- Check your address against breach databases and change any reused passwords you find.
- Consider migrating. If an address has been circulating for a decade, a clean one plus disciplined habits beats fighting the tide.
What none of this fixes
Being disciplined from now on does nothing about lists your address is already on, and disposable addresses do not help with services that already have your real details. Prevention only works forward. That is an argument for starting now rather than for expecting a quick win.