The explosion of unsolicited spam emails

The number of unsolicited emails arriving in my inbox has exponentially increased this year.

Is this AI figuring out our business emails and endlessly spamming addresses until one gets through??Whatever the reason, I believe the sheer volume of unsolicited emails being pushed into our work and personal email accounts has reached a tipping point.

Every morning I spend the first five minutes of my day cleaning out these irrelevant emails from my inbox, and ensuring the relevant ones haven’t accidentally made it into my spam folder.

Even more infuriating is the number of these that expect you to reply to them with ‘opt out’ if you don’t want to hear from them again.?As if you’re not wasting enough of my time having to delete your email or mark it as spam, that you expect me to waste even more time telling you I never wanted to hear from you in the first place.

The unfortunate result of this is I am about to change my work email address to something completely unrelated to my name in an attempt to free up more of my valuable time.?But that annoys me, that I have to create a random email address which could create issues with my clients knowing who they are emailing – just so I can try and avoid the 20-30 spam emails I receive every day from what are clearly lead generation agencies spamming me.

While the EU outlawed these emails from personal email address (with varying degrees of success as they still flood in from non-UE countries), they’ve done nothing to tackle the issue of business emails, and the United States, the self-proclaimed world champion of individual privacy has done even less to deter the spam emails.

In my mind what we need is a global body that can actually take action against these companies that are prolificating the rise in unsolicited emailing.?As we did with junk mail through our letterbox, surely, we can devise a similar gateway for our emails that ask a sender if they really are a legitimate contact of the recipient and if they are not, they run the risk of their company being fined, or their domain being blacklisted.

I’m interested to hear if this is an issue being felt by others and what thoughts or solutions there are available to us, or that we should be trying to implement.

Jeremy Leonard

CEO - LEAD Group