Tackling Annoying Spam Emails

By Omokolade Ogunleye

Spam emails are unsolicited emails sent on the Internet to many people, see them as the weeds of the Internet. Spam emails are not only annoying, but they can also be malicious directly or indirectly. Many have been victims of phishing attacks, frauds, and identity thefts resulting from spam emails. While the list can go on, this piece focuses on ways to tackle spam emails and their consequences, one of which is the breach of privacy. If you would not give everyone your home address, why should you use your private email address for everything you do online? The most basic method to combating email spam is to have a dedicated email address for the most personal and sensitive things, separated from the one for general purposes. Another fundamental practice is to minimize or abstain from posting your email address on public forums and social media. Spammers can harvest tens of thousands of email addresses using search engines in just one minute, and they can retrieve millions with the adoption of advanced tools. Besides financial loss, spam emails can also result in privacy concerns. Did you ever know someone could track you simply by opening an email? The best way to avert this is to resist the urge to open emails from unknown or untrusted senders. While this method may be a little advanced and requires more effort, it is well worth it. Different email service providers define alias differently, but Microsoft calls everything essentially before the @ symbol of your outlook.com email, for instance, an alias. And I will use a Microsoft free email account for this demonstration because they avail up to 10 email aliases, including the primary email address for every Microsoft account. Use those available aliases, which I will refer to as primary alias, to create email addresses for activities you do online. For example, you can create one like shopping@outlook.com (probably unavailable by now, but you can get creative). Now, here is the trick. You can add a secondary to the just-created primary alias by using the + sign with a reference keyword, as in shopping+amazon.ca@outlook.com. Boom! While you must create primary aliases from your Microsoft account for this to work, no action is required to use the secondary—“alias of alias” magic. In other words, assuming you have already created the shopping@outlook.com alias, all you need to do while registering on the Amazon.ca website is to use shopping+amazon.ca@outlook.com. All correspondence to this “alias of alias” still goes to your inbox. Then you can get creative having gotten here by creating a folder in your mailbox, in this case, shopping, and filtering all the email correspondence from Amazon.ca to it. That way, if you get any correspondence from another source to an alias other than the site you used it for, it is safe to assume the site shared that address. Or they were perhaps involved in a cyberattack that breached your information, including that email address. There are also a couple of downsides to this method. Regardless of how you see it, you have to choose your battle. Weigh your options and consider if it is worth the effort to fight spam and email privacy. It is up to you, but I hope this piece informs you more than you previously were.