We often see customers who are overwhelmed by junk email. Their inbox is full of fake invoices, fake parcel notifications, fake account warnings, fake prize claims, fake security alerts, and all sorts of unpleasant rubbish they never asked for. Some people get a few per week. Others get hundreds per day. Once it gets to that point, email stops being useful and starts feeling like another job.
The first reaction is usually to ask how to block it all. That makes sense, but unfortunately it is not how spam works. Email was designed so that anyone who knows your address can send you a message. That is why your family, accountant, doctor, bank, or repair shop can reach you. It is also why scammers and spammers can send junk to the same address. So the aim is not to completely stop spam. That is not realistic. The aim is to keep it out of your main inbox, avoid making it worse, and reduce the chance of falling for something dangerous.
Blocking individual senders usually does not help much. Most spam does not come from one fixed email address. Spammers often use fake addresses, stolen accounts, temporary domains, and automated systems that change constantly. You can block one sender today, then receive the same type of junk tomorrow from a completely different address.
There is another problem. The sender address shown in an email can be fake. A spam message may appear to come from a real person, a real company, or even your own address. That does not mean they sent it. It only means the address was forged. If you block the visible sender, you may accidentally block something legitimate later, while doing almost nothing to stop the real source of the spam.
Unsubscribing is another common mistake. If the email is from a proper business you recognise, such as a newsletter you signed up for, using the unsubscribe link is usually fine. If the email is obvious spam, do not click unsubscribe. Do not reply. Do not click any links. Do not open attachments. Scammers do not honour unsubscribe requests. In many cases, clicking confirms that your address is active and being read by a real person. That can make your address more valuable to them.
The most useful tool is your spam filter. Most email providers already have one. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Telstra/Bigpond Mail, and most other services try to detect junk before it reaches your inbox. Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365 are better, while older emails you signed up for two decades ago tend to suck at it. If you are getting hundreds of spam emails in your junk folder, that is annoying, but it means the filter is catching them. If you are getting hundreds in your main inbox, the filter needs attention. It may not be enabled properly, it may not be learning from your actions, or your email account may simply be very exposed after years of use.
When spam appears in your inbox, do not just delete it. Mark it as spam or junk. This matters. Deleting removes that one message. Marking it as spam tells the email service that similar messages should be filtered in future. Over time, this helps the filter improve. This will not fix everything instantly. You may need to keep marking junk for a while before the inbox improves. But it is still the correct habit. Every spam message that is only deleted is a missed chance to train the filter. Every spam message marked correctly gives the system more information.
The same applies in reverse. Sometimes a real email ends up in the spam or junk folder. This can happen with invoices, appointment confirmations, password resets, quotes, online orders, or messages from small businesses. If you find a real email in junk, do not just move it back to the inbox. Mark it as “not spam” or “not junk.” That teaches the filter that messages like that should be allowed through. You do not need to live in the junk folder, but it is worth checking it occasionally. This is especially important if you are waiting for something specific and it has not arrived. Spam folders usually delete old messages automatically after a set period, so they should not be treated as storage.
Avoid opening spam where possible. Many email systems block remote images in suspicious messages, and that is a good thing. Images in emails can be used to confirm that a message was opened. If a spammer can see that an address is active, that address may receive more junk. Attachments are more serious. Never open attachments from suspicious emails as these are common ways to spread malware or steal passwords. If an email looks like it came from your bank, Microsoft, Telstra, Australia Post, PayPal, the ATO, or another major service, do not use the links in the email. Go to the official website yourself or use the app you normally use.
If your email address has been around for a long time, especially an older Bigpond, Optus or iiNet address, it may already be on many spam lists. That can happen because the address was used on websites, online forms, shopping accounts, old mailing lists, competitions, public directories, or leaked in a data breach. Sometimes it happens because someone else forwarded emails with everyone’s address visible. Once an address is widely circulated, you cannot really make it private again.
For long-term sanity, it is worth using more than one email address. Keep one address for important accounts such as banking, government, utilities, medical services, and business matters. Use another address for shopping, newsletters, online forms, and less important sign-ups. If the second address starts getting too much spam, replacing it is much easier.
For businesses, public email addresses also need care. If your email address is displayed on your website, it will attract spam. Contact forms can help, but they need proper spam protection. Business email should also be configured correctly to protect your domain from being impersonated and improve email reliability. They will not stop every spam message, but they are part of running email properly.
The basic rules are simple. Do not reply to spam. Do not unsubscribe from obvious spam. Do not click links. Do not open attachments. Do not load images in suspicious emails. Mark junk as spam instead of only deleting it. Check the junk folder occasionally and mark real messages as not spam. Use a separate email address for sign-ups that do not matter much. Spam is not going away. But it should not take over your inbox either. A good spam filter, used properly, can turn a messy inbox into something manageable again.
If your email has become difficult to use, we can help clean it up, check your settings, improve filtering, secure your account, and show you what to avoid. Bring the laptop in, or book a remote session, and we can help sort it out before a cluttered inbox turns into a bigger security problem.
There is also the nuclear option: move to a new email address. This is not the first step, because changing email addresses is annoying and touches more accounts than most people realise. But if an old address is completely overrun with spam, especially an older ISP address like Bigpond, starting fresh can be the cleanest fix. The right way to do it is gradually.
Create the new address, secure it properly with a strong password and two-factor authentication, then update your important logins first: banking, government, utilities, medical services, insurance, Apple or Microsoft accounts, online shopping, and anything tied to payments or identity. Keep the old mailbox running for a transition period and forward mail to the new address temporarily, but do not treat forwarding as a permanent solution. The goal is to catch anything you missed while slowly moving real contacts and important accounts across. After a few months, the old address can be left as a low-priority mailbox or closed if you no longer need it.
And if you are worried that your old emails will disappear, we can back them and move the archive to your new email address!
