How to stop spam emails?

[CanadianJohn]

When I was in hospital last summer, I used the terrible wifi at the hospital, and I been getting zillions of spam emails since. I use gmail. At one time, I was getting 1000 spam emails a day. I'm down to a couple of hundred now.

Most of the spam goes to my spam folder, and gmail's automatic process - in theory - sends an "unsubscribe" reply. That automatic unsubscribe doesn't seem to work, and I have been laboriously unsubscribing individually to the most prolific spam.

Unfortunately, my email address is getting around ... I now get updates from San Jose public library, a flyer from a grocery chain in Greece, ads for rental properties in South Africa, help studying from a college in Australia ... you get the idea.

Is there any way out of this mess, other than changing my email address. I don't really want to change, because of the dozens of personal contacts and businesses that legitimately send me emails.

Click on the sender to display their address and block them

Thank you, but I'm doing that.... blocking then one by one. However, I'm getting as many as 200 spam emails a day, and new one seem to pop up all the time. The Greek grocery store is a new one, and so are the South African rentals. I got a new one today, encouraging me to enroll in baseball this season.

Do you use the labels within gmail (I still think of them as folders), and then have filters set up to move your legitimate emails into those labels?

Make sure when you set up the filters, you tick the box to archive the emails. Then all of your legitimate emails are labelled, unread, but crucially not in your inbox.

Then, you can make a relatively safe assumption that the unlabelled emails in your inbox are emails you don't want. Select all those emails in your inbox and mark them as junk. Gmail will catch on and start sending those emails directly to your junk folder.

Your mistake has been unsubscribing to emails you never signed up for, btw. Never respond to an email where you never agreed contact with that company... you're just highlighting that your email account is active, causing your email address to be sold to more spammers, hence the predicament you're now in. Don't unsubscribe, just mark as junk, block their domain if they get persistent, and let gmail's spam function do its job.

I agree that unsubscribing makes matters worse. I just whizz down the emails in my Junk folder (Hotmail) and delete them. Do you think it's worth reporting those as spam or phishing?

"I have been laboriously unsubscribing individually to the most prolific spam."

Stop doing this. It confirms to the spammer that your email address is active.

Just block and delete.

If you're getting that many, change your email address and only actively unsubscribe from the ones you have had legitimate interactions with (eg online shopping). The rest, block and delete.

If they’re in your Hotmail junk folder, Hotmail has already recognised that they’re spam. So just emptying your junk folder is fine.

if it was turning up in your inbox, just deleting would be insufficient. You’d want to mark it as spam so that Hotmail would learn that it’s unwanted and auto direct it to your junk folder.

If you are getting lots for things that seem like legit businesses in a specific location ( eg library and grocery store in California), it may be that there is a genuine person on California with a similar email address to yours who keeps using your address.

Eg if you are Sarah.smith@gmail

And California lady is Sara.smith at gmail

But shops etc that ask for Sara's email at the til then type it in as Sarah. So you get the messages.

I have an alter ego in the USA who does this a lot. I can see all sorts of things she does!