Ask HN: Strategies for Dealing with Email Spam?

4 points by chiyc 3 years ago | 3 comments

I've been receiving junk mail recently at an incredible rate. Outlook had some trouble filtering them out at first, but it seems like it's finally caught on. Unfortunately, I still feel like I can't avoid looking through the junk folder though because I'll inevitably miss something I need that gets thrown in there.

What strategies do you have for dealing with spam? Aliases and filtering rules? Are particular providers better at dealing with it? Do I just dump this address for a new one?

LinuxBender 3 years ago |

Anecdotally I moved some really old domains to fastmail and set the spam global rules to move anything with a spam score of 4+ to the spam folder and to delete anything 10+ and I receive no spam. This is not enabled by default. One of the domains I moved had several email addresses that had been leaked to the worst of the worst spammers.

For the sites that are not technically spam because I signed up for them, I have rules that move their emails to a folder and mark them as read. One can set retention of each folder. So if I realize I might have needed to view one of the emails, I can look for it but if I don't then it eventually goes away without bothering me.

beardyw 3 years ago |

Over the years I have tried to compartmentalise by creating different email addresses:

1. a very old Yahoo address which I never care about unless I need to validate a sign up - a swamp of spam

2. a Gmail address I use for companies I buy from regularly - sadly now badly spammed

3. a Gmail address I use for money/banks and health only - not spammed yet

4. an account on my domain used by friends and family - spammed rarely

5. a Gmail account I use to consolidate the above (including spam) except #1 and where I read mail. By accidentally using it as a "from" in replies I do get some direct emails and a little direct spam.

Theory and practice turn out to be different.

BlameKaneda 3 years ago |

I created a Gmail account that's specifically for email signups and shut off the notifications for it.

I traveled over the summer and relied heavily on free WiFi, which meant me signing up and giving them my email. I knew that I was going to be bombarded with spam, so I created the junk account to handle all of it.