Why you shouldn't delete spam in your email: Unexpected explanation

Why you shouldn't delete spam emails

All major email services are starting to use sophisticated and adaptive spam filters that are becoming more and more accurate in identifying the right and wrong emails every day. An important condition for this learning effect is that the software must be able to train itself, and spam emails are just the thing for that.

What to do instead of deleting spam emails

If you use an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird

Manually mark relevant messages as spam (or junk) if your email program does not automatically do so. This will help train your spam filter, and you'll have to deal with fewer annoying emails in the future as the automatic filter improves.

If you receive emails through a browser

Depending on the service you use, you can mark unwanted messages as spam in different ways. Of course, you'll need to do this if such emails appear as normal in your inbox and are not in the spam folder.

You can mark such messages in the Inbox folder (by checking them off) and move them to the spam folder using the Spam or Junk command in the menu bar. This also works with individual (open) emails, for which the path to the spam folder sometimes goes through the Move button above the email text.

In both your personal and professional life, these procedures will help reduce the number of spam messages in the long run. Senders of such messages are also more likely to be blacklisted.

If you use a shared mail server in your office, you can do your coworkers a great service by preventing the same fraudulent messages that you've already marked as spam and filtered out.

It's worth noting that unwanted emails are usually automatically deleted from the respective folders after 30 days. Memory issues are very rare, even if messages are not manually deleted. If the junk folder is not automatically cleared, you should delete its contents once a month.

Don't unsubscribe from spam emails

Many service providers and email clients now offer an easy way to unsubscribe from unwanted promotional emails, newsletters, etc. with a single click right in your inbox. This feature is useful if you don't want to manually unsubscribe from mailings or are not interested in the advertising contained in emails.

However, this useful feature can also hide a danger, especially in the case of fraudulent messages. The point is that you are inadvertently letting the sender know that your email address is real and in active use.

Spam scammers send millions of emails every day, sometimes indiscriminately, to randomly generated addresses. They often don't know whether the accounts they're writing to actually exist or whether the messages are being read - until the users click the unsubscribe button. Then fraudsters receive a request to stop sending emails to that address, and then, of course, they do the exact opposite.

How to protect yourself from spam and online fraud

Be alert

It sounds trivial, but it could protect many victims of cybercrime. As soon as you have doubts about the sender or content of new messages, you should be wary and assume that someone is trying to deceive you. This is especially important if you are asked to pay for something or provide personal data.

Remain calm

If someone asks you to act quickly (and therefore impulsively) in an urgent email, you should be wary. Honest companies don't put pressure on customers or threaten to send a reminder if you don't comply immediately.

Avoid links in emails

If you're asked to follow a link in an email, it makes sense to find the page you're looking for on your own. Enter the URL in your browser (if you know it) or let Google find the page for you.

Do not open unknown attachments

Stay away from questionable email attachments. Malware can even be hidden in Excel files, Word documents, or images. This is always the case with executable files (EXE) or archives (ZIP, RAR, etc.). HTML files should also be avoided, as they can redirect to dangerous servers.