How to Stop Email Spam and Keep Your Business Inbox Clean (6 Ways)

In 2023, the number of daily spam emails in the U.S. was estimated to be eight billion. Not only is spam frustrating, but it can also be time-consuming to deal with and it can clog up your inbox. Plus, spammy messages often try to lure you into online scams or inject malware into your device.

However, there are strategies you can use to block spam emails and clean up your inbox. These will help you improve productivity as you won’t need to waste time deleting emails. Additionally, you can secure your inbox against dangerous email-based attacks like phishing emails.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the impact of spam on businesses. Then, we’ll show you how to block email spam and de-clutter your inbox. Let’s jump right in!

The Impact of Spam Emails on Businesses

Although the rate of spam emails has gone down significantly, they still account for nearly 49 percent of total email traffic. As a business owner, you’ll want to do everything you can to block unwanted messages.

Spam emails clog up your inbox, depleting your email storage and making it difficult to find important messages. As a result, genuine emails can get lost or accidentally deleted in a messy inbox.

Additionally, spam emails can slow down your team’s productivity. Deleting spam and updating spam filters can be very time-consuming and tedious.

However, there are more dangerous aspects of unsolicited emails. For instance, the spam message may contain malware links that corrupt your device or systems.

Additionally, emails are a popular way to carry out phishing attacks, which try to trick you into sharing confidential information. These emails can be difficult to spot since the sender impersonates legitimate companies.

How to Stop Email Spams and Keep Your Business Inbox Clean (6 Ways)

Now that you know a bit more about the impact of unwanted spam, here are six strategies that can help you block spam emails from reaching your inbox.

1. Choose a Quality Email Hosting Provider 

The easiest way to prevent spam emails from infecting your business inbox is to use a quality email provider. This way, you can access the most up-to-date security features to protect your business against the latest email threats.

SirsteveHQ offers an excellent email hosting service that lets you set up a custom domain that matches your website domain.

You’ll also get a dedicated IP address. This can help ensure that your messages never end up in the spam folder.

Not only that, but with SirsteveHQ’s suite of security tools, you can protect yourself against spam emails, ransomware attacks, and phishing emails (which can lead to a data breach).

Even if you do encounter malicious threats, SirsteveHQ backs up all your email data. Therefore, it’s easy to restore your inbox if your data gets altered or deleted.

Regardless of the plan you choose, you’ll get access to a dedicated support team that’s available 24/7 to help you resolve issues.

2. Report Emails as Spam and Block Email Addresses 

Naturally, you can just delete spam emails that come into your inbox. However, this won’t stop spammers from sending more malicious emails your way in the future.

An effective way to prevent spam is to report the emails to your email client (like Yahoo Mail or Gmail) and block the specific email address(es).

If you have a Gmail inbox, you can report spam by ticking the box to the left of the email and selecting the Report Spamoption (which appears as a stop sign icon in the mailbox toolbar):

Next, you’re ready to block the email address to permanently prevent future spam from the same source. However, it’s important to be careful how you go about this since opening some spam emails can trigger more junk emails from other spam accounts.

Again, if you use the Gmail app, you can block spam email addresses by checking the box besides the email. Then, click on the three dots in the toolbar and select Filter messages like these:

Now, click on Create filterto filter spam from that specific email address. From the list of actions, choose Delete itand click on Create filteragain to complete the process.

3. Use Email Authentication Protocols

If you’re looking to block suspicious emails from your business inbox, you can also use email authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM. Most quality email services (like SirsteveHQ) provide email authentication by default.

This way, when you receive junk mail or spam, you should see options that enable you to inspect the full email header which reveals the results of the SPF and DKIM checks. These protocols verify the integrity of the message to make sure that emails are legitimate.

Meanwhile, you can also set up DMARC policies to tell your email server what to do with emails that are flagged as spam.

4. Change Your Email Privacy Settings

The next way to block spam emails from your inbox is to change your email privacy settings. This way, you can reduce your exposure to spam in the first place.

Naturally, it’s best to be careful about the individuals and organizations that you share your business email address with. You can also implement strong passwords and multi-factor authentication to secure user accounts. Again, the best email hosting providers will provide options to set this up.

You can easily adjust your email privacy settings within your email client to stop third parties and advertisers from having access to your email address.

In Gmail, you can do this by clicking on your account icon in the top right corner of your inbox. Then, select Manage your Google Account and use the menu to the left of the screen, to choose the Securityoption:

Here, you can manage your data and privacy settings. You’ll see a list of all the apps and services that have access to your email address, and you can block unwanted messages from them by deleting this connection.

5. Unsubscribe From Newsletters and Mailing Lists

Sometimes, when you subscribe to a website, you might inadvertently agree to terms that enable the site to share details with spam subscription lists.

Fortunately, it’s really simple to unsubscribe from these emails. If you open the email, you’ll often find a clear Unsubscribelink at the bottom of the message.

Alternatively, if you enter “unsubscribe” into the search bar of your inbox, you can pull up all the emails that you can unsubscribe from. Select the emails you never open or read, and click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the campaign.

This is also a great way to clean up your business inbox.

6. Check if Your Email Is on the Dark Web 

There’s a possibility that your business email address has been leaked on the dark web, which may expose you to tons of spam emails and online scams like advanced spear-phishing attacks.

The good news is that there are plenty of free dark web scanning tools, including Keeper Security:

These scans enable you to find out if your credentials have been stolen in a data breach. If this is the case, you can take the time to secure any compromised email account(s). For instance, you can update your login credentials with strong, unique passwords.

Conclusion

Not only can spam emails clog up your inbox, but they can also cause you to accidentally lose important emails. Plus, they may lead to more concerning threats (like malware or ransomware), which can have lasting effects on your business and reputation.

To recap, here’s how to prevent email spam and keep your business inbox clean:

1. Choose a quality email hosting provider like SirsteveHQ.
2. Report emails as spam and block spam email addresses (with spam filters).
3. Use email authentication protocols.
4. Change your email privacy settings.
5. Unsubscribe from newsletters and mailing lists.
6. Check if your email is on the dark web.

With SirsteveHQ, you’ll get access to superior spam protection and premium email deliverability tools. Better yet, you can set up a custom domain and use dedicated IP addresses to enhance email security. Get started today!