Is your email overrun by marketing messages?

I’ve tried the separate email accounts approach (I have at least 6 of them now!) but I now get junk in all of them! The latest is messages with the heading starting “ADV” (for advert, presumably, which I have no clue as to their origins and why I’ve suddenly started receiving them). I did the “unsubscribe” bit on them but it hasn’t worked.
I too have “unsubscribed” but then the organisation starts mailing me after a period of time. Some big, supposedly reputable, companies do this.
With personal emails, so many of my friends forward “funnies” to me but make the address lists visible to all addressees – despite me repeatedly asking them to put people’s addresses in the “BCC” (blind copy) field so that we can’t see other people’s email addresses. There will always be someone who sees this as a marketing opportunity and, being personal, your details might be being given out to someone in your past personal life who you don’t want to have your contact details!
Quite a few businesses I deal with also circulate emails with other businesses’ email addresses on them, and again I tell them not to do it but they still do (breach of data protection/confidentiality??).
Competitions seem to be really bad. I’ve entered several on the ITV website and, despite not opting for communications from “third parties”, each time I’ve entered I’ve received lots of junk emails from various companies almost immediately afterwards, plus phonecalls.
I agree re company “groups” too – there are so many huge organisations these days and the last thing we want is to be bombarded with emails from each arm of the organisation.
I think too that the “surveys” approach is another ploy to send us junk mail (eg signing up to complete surveys in return for reward points/airmiles, but the surveys become more and more related to us personally and the junk mail increases again).
I’ve even stopped rushing to answer my (sole trader) business mobile ‘phone as 99% of the calls are from people wanting me to advertise with them or let them do work re Google listings (who’ve obtained my details off the internet), and they always seem to call at lunchtimes!

Genuine newsletters that you’ve actively subscribed to can still be too much. I tend to filter these and then read them a batch at a time. I’d prefer them monthly, weekly is too much.

Spam (i.e. unwanted email) – I used to have a tiny but great spam filter tool called K9 (by Keir.net). Worked brilliantly with my POP3 account as it learnt over time. It scores all your mail as a % so you only need to check the borderline scores for any ‘false positives’. It also scanned mail on your POP3 server so when you deleted spam it effectively sent an ‘undeliverable’ message to spammers. Now, believe it or not, spammers do care because the large number of people paying vast sums of money to use their services demand ‘hit’ and ‘success’ rates and want confidence that their emails are only being sent to genuine email addresses. This actually resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of spam being sent to me.

However, I’m on Blueyonder and good old Virgin decided to team up with GoogleMail. The result? K9 no longer works and the Blueyonder Spam filter is just Yes/No – so if there are any false positives you have to sift through all your spam. Because it’s Googlemail the email doesn’t bounce and so the spammers know it landed which results in even more spam.

Sometimes the simple ideas (like K9) are the best.

Service providers should all be required to provide a “BLOCK” buttom so that persistnt spammers do not get through

My friends don’t seem to do much communicating by e-mail because we tend to meet or talk on the telephone [none of us Tweets or has a Facebook profile] so 90% of my inbox is probably commercial of which half is marketing [say 20 a week]. I don’t think I get too many marketing messages because I strictly control who gets my e-mail address and diligently de-subscribe from those I do not want [or block them if they do not have an effective “unsubscribe” facility]. It is useful to get Sale or Promotion announcements from certain favoured companies but I get fed up with those I otherwise approve of [like Amazon and Screwfix] that send something every single day. Annoyingly, John Lewis sometimes has a bout of daily mailing.

The Junk and Spam filters on my MSN system [Hotmail] seem to work pretty well and I can mark any incoming message as a phishing scam; that stops further deliveries from the same address but the bad scammers are wise to that and keep contriving different origination addresses.

Hannah, I sympathise with your predicament – having to instantly delete 270 out of 350 messages on return from holiday is no joke and perhaps you do now need to spend some precious time dealing with the unwanted senders; it should be worth while in the long run. Some companies deliberately make de-subscribing difficult – you have to send them an e-mail then respond to a questionnaire about why you are unsubscribing and then answer their confirmation request and it still doesn’t do it. However, most firms have a quick one-click system that does the trick and I think you could quickly eliminate a significant proportion of your unwanted senders.

I certainly share Rose’s views on circulation lists. A friend recently let all his contacts know his new home address and has effectively transferred his entire address book [including some people’s most private ‘second’ e-mail addresses] into the public realm. Many people do not seem to know about [or how to activate] the BCC field on their round-robins. The major drawback with the e-mail system is the ease with which anything can be forwarded and re-forwarded with completely unpredictable consequences and without the consent of the original correspondent. I was not very happy when my solicitor insisted on doing all the conveyancing correspondence by e-mail; luckily nothing went wrong for me but I saw some material in an attachment from the other party’s side that should not have been recirculated.

The strange thing is that, despite the growth of e-marketing, we still get a daily deluge of printed material through the letterbox, so perhaps e-mail will die on its feet for this purpose as companies presumably get so little return on it. As they say, 50% of all advertising is wasted, it’s just that nobody knows which 50%.

The best approach is to register your own domain name – it’s only about £5 per year. Any email address you need for commercial reasons – mostly online purchases – you give them a unique email address – drivethedeal@[mydomainname], ebac@[mydomainname], etc.

By displaying the To: column in you mailbox, you immediately know who is the source of the email. More interesting is who these people are on-selling your email address to and sometimes just how careless they are with your email address. It’s amazing how often I get phishing mails, offers of counterfeit goods, etc. that purportedly come from these companies.

My domain names are with 1&1. They have a feature whereby *@yourdomain directs any email address for the domain to another email address. I have which@abc.mydomain.co.uk, (see below for explanation of ‘abc’) but I’ve never set this up as a specific email address; instead any emails that which? send me are directed to myname@mydomain.co.uk which is set up. (1&1 also have spam and antivirus checks built in.) Using this approach has helped me to identify who’s responsible for specific spam I get; because I can’t send emails using e.g. which@abc.mydomain.co.uk, the only way anyone else can obtain this email address is if there’s been some kind of security failure at which? (Don’t worry which?; no spam from you so far.) For example, every now and then I get spam from PCPRO magazine. I’ll forward the spam to them and then set up the pcpro address with 1&1 so that any future emails go straight to them! Hah! Of course I then have to log on to my pcpro account and set up a new pcpro email address.
There is a potential problem with this; once anyone knows my domain, they could use any email address for that domain to spam me. However, using another feature provided by 1&1, I can create a sub-domain, e.g. abc.mydomain.co.uk; so which@abc.mydomain.co.uk. So far this approach has worked well.
But there is a difficulty. How to send emails to which? I have a specific email address that I only use to send emails. I then have to set a replyto email address (e.g. which@abc.mydomain.co.uk) which automatically directs replies to this address.
I admit it can be complicated, but so far it has worked for me.

The only long term solution to persistent spammers is simply don’t buy from them. Simples. They will eventually get the message. As a family we dive for the “mute” button when the never ending insurance adverts and price comparison sites come on tv. As a potential customer I now no longer even bother to enquire with these offending companies. (Take not D@@@@@ L###)

I adopted the multiple email approach using yahoo mail for potential spammers, my ISP’s email service for personal correspondence and gmail for storing (by forwarding) any important emails in case my hard drive fails.

I do use the ‘unsubscribe’ facility because, at worst, nothing will happen. I’ve heard a theory that by doing so, what was a blanket spam distribution has then actually been responded to and so the senders have ‘made contact’ and then send more! WHEN I have the time(!) I’ll create separate folders for the ones I really want so that the Inbox just has all the crass.

I get at least 20 e-mails a day from the USA presumably because once I didn’t realise that something I was ordering on line was actually going to be sent from the States. I have tried blocking the names, the domains, particular words but still the e-mails keep coming with different names, domains etc and now all I do is delete them immediately. I never open them. The products range from the decidedly suspect to things which are obviously aimed at Americans from car insurance, sales, insurance and miracle ways to lose weight. Does anyone know what I can do to stop this incessant load of rubbish invading my e-mail?????? I do not want to change my e-mail address.

I am going away on holiday soon. How do I access my email (which.net) to clear out old messages before I depart?