Too Much Junk Email–When should I click ‘Unsubscribe’?

Often you’ll give a company your email in order to receive information from them or as part of their enrollment process. Next thing you know you are getting LOTS of emails from them and none of them are very helpful to you. What can you do?

IF it’s from a company/organization that YOU SIGNED UP WITH and you have verified that the email is indeed from them–you can scroll to the bottom of the email and click the ‘Unsubscribe’ option that they are required by law to have at the bottom of ‘solicitation emails’. This will often open a website where they ask you why you are unsubscribing.

Why shouldn’t I do that with ALL my junk email?

Scammers have caught on to this and will often send out emails that are created to LOOK LIKE the real companies–some examples we’ve seen are really hard to tell that they are fake–and in these cases if you click on the ‘Unsubscribe’ it will possibly do bad things to your computer and at the very least let them know that your email is ‘live and active’–and that you are prone to click on things. They can then sell your email to other scammers–so that ‘unsubscribe’ click will end up bringing even more junk emails to you.

What can I do to stop getting so much junk email?

Once you have cleaned up your current email inbox–unsubscribing from those that you know are real that YOU SIGNED UP WITH–you can utilize your email providers junk/spam/trash settings.

Report emails that look like ‘phishing’–all email providers will have some way to report spam and phishing emails.

• The “From” email address does not look like an official email from that company
• The offer is too good to be true
• When you hover over the link–the website address it’s taking you to is NOT for that company

You can create another email account that you use just for companies–one that you create knowing that it will most likely fill up with all kinds of junk email. Once created you only need to go check it every once in awhile–deleting things–so that the email provider knows that you are still using this email.