How to block spam on email: 5 tips and tricks

Spam, spam, junk mail and junk mail. All are synonyms for useless work that takes up your time and eats away at your efficiency. If you spend an average of 5 minutes each working day cleaning up spam, you’re doing a good 18 hours of wasted work a year. Why do some people receive more spam and how can you most effectively block spam email?

Blocking spam how-to: user actions

The best way to block spam is to stop using email. Well, if you don’t want to stop using email altogether, it’s good to understand what causes spam. There are 14.5 billion spam messages every day. About 45% of all emails are spam. You are likely to receive spam for a few of the most common reasons that you can influence:

Your email address has been publicly disclosed to the authorities and thus ended up being sold to email marketers. Tip #1: Don’t make your email address public.
On your website, your email address is in the plain-language format firstname.lastname@domain.fi. Many spammers use lists compiled by searching for public addresses using robots on websites. Tip #2: change the address to e.g. firstname [dot] lastname [at] domain.fi
You have received spam, downloaded the images that appear in the message. Yes, by default your email client will block the download of images, as it is a signal to the sender that you have opened the email. You may have clicked on the links in the message, which is why you are receiving two or more pieces of spam. Even that “unsubscribe” link can shoot you in the foot, so it’s not always safe to click on that either. Tip #3: don’t download images, don’t click on links.
You have given your email address in various competitions, sweepstakes or have given your email address through another service (e.g. Facebook and its apps). Tip #4: Don’t give your email address to every service. Sign up for strange or slightly unfamiliar services with a less important email address than the one you use every day.

The tips above are about spam prevention, but what if the problem has already happened? Is your email inbox still getting clogged up? Let’s take a look at the issue and the options for what to do.

Blocking spam: how to fight spam globally?

To prevent spam, it is good to understand how spam is being fought globally and why spam messages are still circulating online. Globally, the fight against spam takes many forms, with large email service providers often relying on third-party providers that maintain email server registries and constantly learning about content filters.

These registries include, most importantly, blacklisted addresses, which, when hit, no longer allow messages from the provider to be accepted by all email services. Such lists are maintained by SpamCop.net.

If a blacklisting has occurred, the service provider must find out what caused it and report back when it has been corrected. Otherwise, the blacklisting email service provider will not allow messages from your IP address to be sent to your email service provider. This shifts the responsibility for the throughput of email messages and the maintenance of the systems to any ISP that has the ability to send email messages from their IP address.

For example, webhosting providers are such service providers, which is why every webhosting customer should ensure that their publication management systems are up to date, for example, to avoid a security hole that could turn the webhosting server into a spam server.

Fortunately, there are many tools to prevent this and to detect it quickly in the webhosting administration. However, these are things over which end users have no control. Let’s now look at what you as a webhosting customer can influence and how.

Blocking spam requires filtering it

By default, webhotels typically do not filter spam, i.e. these so-called blacklisted addresses or suspicious messages are not excluded. XetNET webhosting customers have the option in the cPanel management tool to turn on the free, open source Apache SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin is not a shortcut to happiness, but it understands the server to analyse messages based on various rules before the message ends up in your Inbox.

The best server-level spam filtering is provided by the Spam Filtering add-on service, as it learns and even updates in real-time. That’s why it’s our tip #5: a spam blocking service that provides a quality filter, with a database that is constantly updated and a filter performance close to 100%. The service costs €4/month/domain, so the whole company can get filtering for all its employees on a single domain for €4/month. The service also effectively detects viruses, phishing attacks and malware distribution attempts. If you’re looking for a business email solution where you want your servers and data to be located in Finland, check out our business email service.

The above options handle emails at the server level, meaning your emails will not be filtered outside Finland. There are also a few ways to reduce spam on the terminal, i.e. inside the email client.

Email clients usually provide the basics for spam filtering

Your email program understands some spam filtering. If you use the default email clients that come with Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac OS or Windows, for example, it’s likely that your email client has a spam filter built in.

These built-in spam filters work in different ways, typically based on an analysis of the message: whether there is something suspicious about the message that causes it to be interpreted as spam. In addition, spammers’ addresses can be added to the list of blocked addresses, but spammers rarely use the same address. Therefore, it often seems that an email program has to be taught for a long time until it becomes useful. Because spammers know how to circumvent these methods and the programs’ own filters, it often seems that the spam filters in email programs are not very effective.

Try spam filtering in your email program to see if it helps, but turn on server-side filtering if you don’t get a solution to the problem and the amount of spam increases.