How to Stop Spam Emails for Good

A flooded inbox full of promotional emails and spam is exhausting. Here's how to get it under control without abandoning your email address.

Understand Where Spam Comes From

Most "spam" falls into three categories:

1. Marketing emails from companies you've signed up with (or that bought your email)
2. Data breach emails — your address was leaked in a breach and sold
3. True spam — random bulk senders

Each requires a slightly different fix.

Step 1: Unsubscribe Aggressively

For marketing emails from real companies, unsubscribing is the right move — it actually works and is legally required to be honoured within 10 days (in the US, UK, and EU).

Scroll to the bottom of any marketing email and click Unsubscribe. If there's no unsubscribe link, that's a sign of true spam — report it instead.

Gmail tip: Search for unsubscribe in Gmail to find every mailing list you're on at once. Work through them.

Step 2: Use Gmail's "Block Sender" Feature

For senders you never want to hear from again:

• Open the email
• Click the three dots (⋮) top right
• Select Block [sender name]

All future emails from that sender go straight to Spam.

Step 3: Set Up Filters

If you keep getting emails from a specific domain or with a specific subject:

Gmail: Settings → See all settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses → Create a new filter. Set it to automatically delete or archive matching emails.

Outlook: Right-click an email → Rules → Create rule.

Step 4: Use a "Burner" Email Address for Sign-Ups

The root cause of most spam is giving your real email to every website that asks. Instead:

• Gmail alias trick: if your email is you@gmail.com, sign up with you+shopname@gmail.com. Gmail delivers it to your inbox, but you can filter by the alias to see who sold your email.
• Apple Hide My Email: if you use Sign in with Apple, it generates a unique random email per app that forwards to you.
• SimpleLogin or DuckDuckGo Email Protection: free services that generate disposable forwarding addresses.

Step 5: Report Spam (Don't Just Delete)

When you mark an email as spam instead of deleting it, you train your email provider's filter — making it smarter for you and everyone else.

• Gmail: checkbox → Report spam button
• Outlook: Right-click → Mark as junk

Step 6: Check if Your Email Was Breached

Visit haveibeenpwned.com and enter your email. If it appears in known data breaches, your email is circulating in databases that spammers buy. You can't undo this, but you can:

• Be more aggressive with spam filters
• Consider a new primary email address if the volume is unmanageable
• Use different emails for different purposes going forward

If Nothing Else Works

Some people's email addresses are so thoroughly circulated that the only real fix is creating a new address and migrating over. It's a pain, but it's worth it if you're getting hundreds of spam emails a day.

Set up forwarding from the old address temporarily, update important accounts (banking, work, subscriptions), and let the old address die.