How much attention do you pay to junk mail? In my accounts, I find the volume runs in waves. For example, I’ve seen Russian spam on various channels come in droves for a short while and then not for a long time.

I’ve briefly mentioned spam email in the context of your awareness of phishing attacks (Gone Phishing) but haven’t shared a tutorial and insights on what to do about it otherwise.

Whether you’re regularly inundated with unwanted email or only a bit invades your inbox, here are some best practices for dealing with it.

Mark as Junk Mail

In Mail or whatever email application or website you use, there is a convention for marking an email as junk or spam. Mail provides a toolbar button and equivalent commands in the Message menu and contextual menu as well. The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Command+J.

When you find spam in your inbox, the best practice is to mark it as such. Moving a message to the junk mailbox satisfies the intention.

Doing so sends a message to your email server about the occurrence and that the message was improperly marked. Hopefully, future messages like it will go straight to your junk mailbox.

Move to Inbox

Likewise, when you find legit email in your junk mailbox, take the time to move it to your inbox or otherwise indicate that it’s not junk mail. This triggers an equivalent message to the server that trains it to filter better in the future.

Junk Mail Triage

If you use Mail on your Mac, one more best practice is to sort your junk mailbox by sender (From). Many messages come from the same origin, so this arrangement makes spam easier to triage. (Unfortunately, message sorting is not possible in Mail on iPhone and iPad.)

To stay on top of the intrusion, I recommend viewing your junk mail every couple days to stay on top of it. It should be pretty easy for you to discover wanted messages to move back to your inbox.

Junk Commands on iPhone & iPad

On mobile devices, the Move to Junk and Move to Inbox commands are in the menu of actions that appears when you tap the Reply button, or swipe left on a message in the list and tap More.

You can also long-press on a single message in the list or select multiple messages to act on together. Tap Mark and then find the relevant command in the submenu.

What about all the other unwanted email you receive? The solicitations for political donations, sale ads from shops you frequent, newsletters you subscribed to, etc.

It’s a good idea to learn to differentiate between true junk mail and things you legitimately subscribed to. A lot of spam messages feature poor grammar, have extraneous characters in the subject line, and/or show a picture or attachment instead of text in the body.

These and others are telltale signs and I recommend not trying to unsubscribe from these. If you do, you’re likely to get more.

If you get tons of junk mail, no amount of reporting seems to make a difference, and there seems no hope of getting it under control, it may be time to consider retiring your email address.

Finally, feel free to reach out if you need help judging message. You can forward the message to coach@sustainablecomputing.net for my feedback. Please also take the time to first share what you think about the email and why you’re questioning it in the first place.