Over 100 billion bulkmail messages are sent every day. You may know them as spam, junk mail, unsolicited email. Whatever you call them, they’re annoying. At the least, they clutter your inbox and present the risk of you missing important emails from family, friends, and coworkers. At the worst, they put your computer at risk for viruses and make you susceptible to identity theft and costly or time-consuming processes to keep yourself and your contacts safe.

There’s no simple way to eradicate spam entirely, but there are 13 tricks you can use to drastically reduce the amount of spam you receive.

13 Lifehacks to Reduce Spam and Bulkmail

1. Catch-all: If you own your own mailserver domain, set up a catch-all email address to bounce phishing emails with an undeliverable error.
2. SPF Records: Request your host set-up rules on the mailserver to block messages that don’t have an SPF record. SPF records require mail be authenticated from the sender domain.
3. Research: Find an email provider you can trust. Yahoo! has suffered an unprecedented number of data breaches recently. Mail.com makes a business out of sharing user information. Try to find one that’s known for having strict security and protecting user privacy.
4. Filters: Find an email provider with strong spam filters. Gmail’s built-in spam filtering is fairly aggressive. Hosts that incorporate blacklists (like Spamcop) dramatically reduce the number emails that slip through spam filters.
5. Burners: For contests, polls/surveys, and single-use applications, give recipients a temporary email (or burner) instead of your real email address.
6. Forwarders: For online services, retailers, and non-family members, give recipients an email forwarder instead of your real email address. Forwarders simply relay messages to your inbox. They’re free, and can be blocked/deactivated if they start to receive spam.
7. Safe-guarding: Never give your email address to people you don’t entirely trust. Family members aside, even banks, mortgagers, credit card companies, and reputable retail outlets suffer breaches/hacks or offer user private data to third parties and marketing partners. Check their privacy policies, typically found in the footer of web sites, and keep in mind that they change frequently. In most cases, give these institutions a forwarder (see above) or opt for paper statements/receipts instead of email.
8. Block: Never click “Unsubscribe” links in email. While there are a number of mass-mailing services that claim to have your best interest in mind, clicking the opt-out link notifies the sender that your email address actually exists and the inbox is being actively checked. In most cases, it’s best if you simply block the sender.
9. Report: While you’re at it, never click links in emails, particularly suspicious ones (e.g., those where the subject starts with “re:” which you know you never wrote before, those with tracking numbers for orders or shipments which you know you didn’t purchase). Hover over them and you’ll see the link at the bottom of your browser or under the cursor in your mail client. If it doesn’t start with “https://” (note the “s”) and include a fully-qualified domain name (e.g., paypal.com, amazon.com, etc.), it’s a spoofing email and should be reported to the website they’re spoofing (e.g., spoof@ebay.com, stop-spoofing@amazon.com, etc.). You can easily find the addresses to forward spam to by searching.
10. Disable: If possible, turn images/links off on all messages in your inbox until you verify that they’re not spam. Images often use beacons, or tracking pixels, that are loaded from the spammer’s server. Simply loading the image notifies the spammer that you’ve viewed the email. These are often used for marketing mail analytics, but can obviously be used for more nefarious reasons too.
11. Assemble: Join a club. There are a number of online spam prevention services that harvest the power of the group to drastically reduce (or even eradicate) the spam in member inboxes (e.g., Bulc Club). Conduct a search and choose the one that best suits your needs.
12. Vigilance: Change your password at least semi-annually, and make it something that’s difficult for bots to guess. In most cases, a longer phrase of seemingly unrelated words is stronger than one word with added characters. For instance, use “21 Spotted Lemurs 1978” for a password instead of “Nicolas1”.
13. Separate: Consider setting up a second email account for non-personal usage (e.g., my-bulkmail-address@somemailprov…) that you’ll check less frequently and don’t mind the spam. This could be used for online purchases, receipts from digital POS systems, and mail that’s not time-sensitive. Simply separating out your personal mail from this account prevents the spam from getting into your mail email’s inbox, but will still require you to wade through spam on your secondary account. Because of this, it’s much easier and less annoying if you just use mail forwarders (see above).

These are a number of techniques you can use to reduce the spam in your inbox. Keep in mind, no one technique is flawless and oftentimes a combination of the above can severely cut down on the bulkmail you receive.

Hope this helps! And keep fighting the good fight!