After yet another inbox cleanup that was supposed to be the last one, you received a new spam email the next day. The influx of unwanted messages from suspicious senders, phishing, or other scam attempts costs us precious time and energy that we would rather invest elsewhere.
In this article, we will address two basic questions: how to stop receiving junk email and how to prevent non-spam emails from ending up in your Spam folder.
How to stop getting junk email
Before any email is allowed into your inbox, your email provider always applies a spam filter. The spam filtering systems are usually complex and are based on a combination of rule-based filtering, analyzing the email contents with software like SpamAssassin (Yes, most email providers can access the content of your emails for different purposes, including spam filtering), machine learning, spam scoring, feedback from users, and so on.
Therefore, you might not even know about many spam and scam attempts, because the server spam filters already recognize them as 100% spam, and you will not find them in your inbox or your Spam folder.
When the provider's server is reasonably (but not completely) sure the message is spam, it will allow the message in but immediately place it in the Junk or Spam folder. If you do not check the Junk folder and move the message to a different folder, such a message might be permanently deleted after a certain time, usually 30 days.
When all of the spam filtering fails, and you still find a spam email in your inbox, you can always flag it as spam and report it to the email provider - this will cause the server to recognize similar emails as spam from that point on.
You can also usually block the sender of unwanted emails, which will automatically sort any emails they send you into your Junk or Spam folder.
How to stop email from going to junk
Even advanced spam filtering technology can sometimes falsely recognize an email as spam.
In such cases, we could unknowingly miss important emails. It's a good practice to regularly check your Spam folder, just in case the spam filters fall short.
When you find a non-spam email in your Junk or Spam folder, you can usually flag it as "not spam", which will let the server know this email should not be placed in the Spam folder in the future.
Most email providers also include a whitelist or safe sender settings, where you can manually add email addresses and domains that should never be flagged as spam.
Email senders that are saved in your contacts are also usually not placed in the spam folder by default.
Blacklist and Whitelist features across email providers
eM Client Blacklist and Whitelist feature for accessible spam filtering
As we mentioned, email providers handle the bulk of spam filtering. However, if you want to make sure no spam or unwanted emails appear in your inbox, you can take advantage of the local Blacklist feature in the eM Client desktop app.
All IceWarp and SmarterMail account users can manage their server-side blacklist in eM Client. And it’s possible for all users to locally blacklist email addresses and domains, so even when the provider's filter misses something, spam will always go to the Spam folder.
The Whitelist feature, on the other hand, will help you handle cases when an email was mistakenly flagged as spam.
To learn more about the eM Client Blacklist and Whitelist, check out this blog post.
Keeping the bad emails out and letting the good ones in has been an issue ever since the early internet times. While depending on your email provider's spam filters will take care of a lot of unwanted messages, the ones that still manage to slip through the cracks have to be dealt with somehow. That is where you might appreciate eM Client built-in spam management features - the eM Client desktop app will help you stay on top of unsolicited emails and maintain a tidy, uncluttered inbox.