Why Am I Getting More SPAM Emails These Days?

You may have noticed you've been getting a whole lot of SPAM emails over the past few months, and every day you continue to get more despite adding source email addresses to the SPAM list, blocking the sender, etc. Why have SPAM emails increased lately?

There's really a lot of reasons for this, which I've shared with others who have asked me this question...

1. Spammers have gotten good about using mechanisms that allow their emails to go through. You might notice a lot of emails you get come from @gmail accounts or @outlook accounts or the like. There's no real way for your spam filter to know whether the @gmail account you're getting is an unwanted message from a spammer or just someone you had met and spoken to, and you welcome their message to you. By simply using a valid email account, spammers can send you as many emails as they'd like until you block them.
2. The cost of sending emails is free, and the cost of getting your email address is for the most part free as well. If you're an important person, someone wants to send you an email to setup a meeting, send you their product information, connect with you to chat, etc. Because a lot of people "work from home", the old days of sending US Mail to someone's work address is completely ineffective. The VP or CEO or Manager may never actually go into the corporate office, and at 68-cents a mailer, why spend real $$ trying to mail something to someone, when again you can email blast hundreds, thousands of people using a valid @gmail account you created this morning.
3. Some of the unwanted emails you get, you signed up for! Any time you've ever signed up for something on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon, Instacart, etc, OR registered to attend a convention, a Webinar, etc and used your email address, you have effectively given permission for someone to use (and sell) your email address.
4. And of course we can thank A.I. to help clean-up previously poorly written emails that you were able to quickly identify, or that spam protection tools would see certain words to block entire messages (ie: Nigerian prince, badddly missspelled words, etc). But with A.I. assistants, someone doesn't have to know a word of English and can craft up a message to you via an A.I. bot and send it out to thousands of email users in seconds!

How Do You Minimize the SPAM You Get?

• Use a Junk Email Account when signing up for things: If you buy something online, register for a conference, do anything where it asks you for your email address, use your Junk email account so that SPAM messages go to that throw away account, not your real account(s)
• Make sure to choose "do not send me messages" if you're ever given the option to uncheck some box when signing up for something. If you don't uncheck the spam box, you have effectively given the company the right to send you messages (and sell your address)
• Opt-Out of Emails from Legitimate sites when you can, so if you sign-up for something or you are registered for something, could be an Airline, Hotel, Rental Car operations, delivery service, etc - If you get unwanted emails from them and they provide you an "unsubscribe" or "opt-out" option, click to get off their mailing list. Unfortunately, many times the org has already sold your email address, so as much as you might not get emails from that one company, you might get emails from dozens of others. Also unfortunately many spammers put an "opt-out" button on their emails, and when you click the thing it doesn't opt you out of their emails but instead tells them you actually do read/see their emails and they'll sell your email address as a good/active email address to other orgs wanting to buy "good" email addresses.
• If your email system provides the ability for you to "block" or "report" an email address as SPAM, usually that'll mean messages will go into your Junk Folder instead of your Inbox. It won't necessarily block the sender and you'll have to look through your Junk Folder every now and then to make sure nothing good actually ended up there, but at least the SPAM message isn't in your INBOX as it used to be.

Can't My I.T. Department Block Unwanted Emails Like they Used to?

I get this question all the time, where people complain that their I.T. department used to be really good at blocking SPAM messages, or that their previous SPAM filter product did a better job.

As I've noted, the SPAM filters haven't gotten worse, the Spammers have just gotten better. As long as they follow the basic constraints of setting up a @Gmail account and send you messages, they WILL get through.

And even if you block 1 company, once your email address has been sold, it's available to an unlimited number of companies and people with bots that can send you a message that becomes an almost impossible task to prevent more and more junk from coming through.

Organizations that try to "crank up" their SPAM filters only find that they get more false positives (good emails getting blocked or thrown in the Junk Mail folder).

A Drastic Measure that Works in Prevent SPAM (for a while)

One thing we've been doing is advising business executives fed up with SPAM is to change their email address. If you're an important person in an organization, your business email address is very well known to spammers, and especially if your email address is a common first name (like bob@, mary@, susan@, tom@).

While it might seem drastic, it's easy to have a new email address assigned to you, and there after tell people you know, work with, and meet to use this new email address. And don't make it a common name, make it something like rm199 or mb315 or tom999 and then DON'T use that new email address to sign-up for anything.

After a few weeks, people you work frequently will just use the new email address. And if you are super fancy with an executive admin, have your admin go through your old Inbox and forward stuff to your new email address where you can reply to that message using your new email address.

Eventually the spammers will get your new email address, but if you are careful NOT to use that address to sign up for things, it could be months/years before your email address becomes broadly known.

Wrap Up

It is very frustrating getting unwanted emails, however when emails are free to send and "everyone" has your email address, the more important you are, the more likely you are going to get tons of unwanted emails from professionals that know how to get messages slipped through any/every spam filter so that messages end up in your Inbox.