Emails have become a very important part of our daily living. Staying in touch with close ones who live thousands of kilometres away, share multimedia and even make the biggest business contacts, have never been that easy. In a nutshell, the present generation is nothing without email services, despite there being other messaging and social tools.
The way emails have grown to the highest level of formal interaction, none others can. However, it is only due to this extreme reliance on emails that some people misuse for spamming. Spamming is a kind of negative promotion through unsolicited email, flood the inbox. Though some people often consider promotional emails as spams, the two are different from each other.
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Promotions vs Spams
Promotional emails are the ones you have authorised to. Whenever you visit a website, you are asked to provide an email to subscribe or signup. These addresses are then used by the original website for promotion by sending bulk emails about any new post. Hence, promotional emails are basically the ones that you have signed up or subscribed for and provided your consent to.
On the other hand, when the email collector sells the addresses to other companies or any other third-party, who then start sending you bulk emails, you are being spammed. In cases of spamming, you wouldn’t be able to recognise the sender or the emails or the content within it, since you have never subscribed to it.
How to block spam emails from different providers?
Spam or junk emails are annoying. Hence, every email service provider offers its users with an option to report any particular thread or sender as spam/junk. Here is how you get to the option.
1. Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook has a very professional interface when it comes to the email layout and options. If you use Outlook, you can add any particular email to junk.
- Right-click on the email you want to junk
- Look for the “Mark as junk” button
The mail will be moved to the junk folder and any further emails from the same sender would be sent to the junk box directly.
2. Email in Mac OS
The Mail in Mac is an email management tool that comes pre-built in Apple devices. The process of marking emails as spam is the same as in Microsoft Outlook. You would need to
- Right-click on the email
- Then click on the “Mark as junk” from the pop-up options.
3. Gmail
Gmail is presently the biggest email service provider and has almost set a monopoly. It has a special feature that allows the users with a dedicated option to “Mark as spam” in bulks. All you would need to do is
- Select the mail threads you want to mark as spam
- Hover over the buttons on the top bar which reads like an exclamation mark
- Click on this “Report spam” button and all the mail threads you have selected will go into the spam folder.
Things to keep in mind for a spam-free email experience
It isn’t very hard to keep spam emails away from your inbox. There are certain “dos” and “do nots” that would ensure that you are not spammed with unsolicited emails.
- Never forget to mark a spam mail. The more you mark unsolicited emails as spam, the better the email service provider would understand what to filter.
- Never make your email public. Subscribing to newsletters is fine, but never type in your email address in the comment section of any website or social media.
- Do not keep signing up on websites randomly. In fact, do not even add your email address on the database of any website that you won’t need.
How to block promotional emails?
Promotional emails aren’t as bad as spams, though too much of it can frustrate everyone. Promotional emails are the newsletters and subscription articles you receive post signing up on any website that has your favourite content and you would want to hear about their future stories.
However, the biggest problem that people face with promotional emails is that at times, they come in such bulk that their inbox looks messy. Important emails are harder to find, business mail threads need to be searched for and all of a sudden you realise that you are receiving emails for posts you aren’t even interested.
Promotional emails are probably not spam because you have signed up yourself. Hence, marking them as spam or junk wouldn’t be very wise. But if you still want to get rid of emails from your inbox, you can do the following.
1. Filter from Gmail
Gmail offers filter options with which you can choose bulk action on the emails from a specific sender or type. What you would need to do is
- Open a promotional message you want to filter and look for a button that looks like three vertical dots on the top right of the screen.
- Once you click on it, a popup menu will come up. Click on “Filter messages like this”.
- You will get a list of the emails on your screen and a form will pop up.
- Here you can choose what action you want to take, whether delete it achieve it or move to another folder.
2. Filter on Outlook
Filtering emails in outlook is extremely simple. Here are the steps:
- Right click on an email from the inbox and choose “Create Rule”.
- You will get a popup for where you can create a rule.
- Add the name of the sender you want to mark as promotional.
- Then choose an action like “Move the message to folder” or “Delete the message”.
This way, as and when a message from that sender arrives, the action is applied.
3. Use a junk email
Most email services are absolutely free. Hence, it is always possible to create a secondary email account that you don’t use for any important things. You can use this email address to submit in surveys, fill up signup forms, subscribe to newsletters, etc. This way, you can still have access to the content you are interested in without messing your personal email inbox.
Conclusion
Email services have become very sophisticated and you get a lot of options to resort to if you face any problems. Receiving spam emails is one such issue you would need to deal with, but it’s all very simple to do.
Marking as spam/junk is important as it makes the service provider aware that any particular email is spam and treat the sender as such. Additionally, moving promotional emails to another folder and creating filter will make sure that such marked messages don’t populate your inbox. You have access to them any day on the prescribed folder.
