Your email address has been shared publicly, leaked, or sold: When you sign up for a service or make a purchase online, you are often required to provide an email address. This email address may be collected and sold to third-party marketers who use it to send out spam emails.
The basic rule of thumb is Ignore, Delete and Forget such email. There are no simple ways of stopping such emails.
Changing address will not stop spam. As soon as the spammers find the new address, then they will start up. However, there are some things you should know. If you are getting "spam bombed", check any accounts such as PayPal, Amazon, eBay etc.
But here's the thing: rushing to click the 'Unsubscribe' button is not the right way to make sure all those unwanted emails don't come back ever again. As counterintuitive as it sounds, unsubscribing will make you receive even more spam in some situations.
For email addresses, go to Settings > Mail > Blocked > Add New. Select the contact that you want to block.
Unfortunately, spammers frequently purchase email addresses in bulk from other companies. If you feel like you've suddenly seen an increase in the amount of spam messages in your inbox, it could be that your email account is on one of these lists.
If you've started to receive an endless flow of junk email, you may be the victim of spam bombing. This is a tactic used by bad actors and hackers to distract you from seeing emails that really are important to you. This can also be an indication that another account has been compromised.
To opt out permanently: Go to optoutprescreen.com or call 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688) to start the process. But to complete your request, you'll need to sign and return the Permanent Opt-Out Election form you'll get after you've started the process.
At the top of the screen, click Settings (the gear icon), then View all Outlook settings. In the window that opens, select Mail > Junk email. Add addresses to the Safe Senders and Domains or Blocked Senders and Domains lists. Change Filters and Reporting as desired.
Professional spammers rely on bots that crawl millions of websites and scrape addresses from pages. Other spammers get email addresses by approaching sellers on underground cybercrime forums, or in open-air markets where addresses are found in mailing lists, websites, chat rooms, and domain contact points.
Companies will often use a 3rd party service to send these of emails. 3rd party services will usually send the emails from multiple addresses, so blocking one can still result in receiving a similar message from one of the alternate addresses.
Change junk mail filter settings
In the Mail app on your Mac, choose Mail > Settings, then click Junk Mail. Specify what Mail should do when junk mail arrives. If you want to verify what the filter identifies as junk mail, select “Mark as junk mail, but leave it in my Inbox.”
Most of the time, clicking on a fraudster's unsubscribe feature will simply confirm your email address is valid and active and this will likely result in your email appearing for sale in cybercriminal forums for years.
Marketers have 10 business days to honor your unsubscribe request. After that, it's a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act for a sender to continue emailing you. If the emails keep coming, you're well within your rights to mark them as spam using your email client's built-in Spam button.
Other Things You Can Do
Return junk mail unopened to the sender by writing “Refused. Return to sender.” on the envelope. Without this special notation; the post office will not return the mail to the sender. Call mail order catalog companies.
If you have not opened the mailpiece, you may mark it "Return to Sender," and the United States Postal Service will return it with no additional charge to you. If you open the mailpiece and do not like what you find, you may throw it away. If you open the mailpiece and like what you find, you may keep it for free.
Why am I suddenly getting a lot of spam emails? Spammers buy bulk email addresses from particular providers to add them to their mailing lists. If you've noted a sudden increase in spam emails landing in your account, there's a high chance that your address was part of a list recently sold to one or more scammers.
Just opening the phishing message without taking any further action will not compromise your data. However, hackers can still gather some data about you, even if all you did was open the email. They will use this data against you to create more targeted cyber attacks in the future.