Say goodbye to email spam

The term “spam” was first used in the 1990s to refer to unsolicited bulk email advertising. Today a large portion of spam emails are still commercial ads – like traditional “junk mail” – but spam can also be dangerous. Some spam messages are designed to trick us into opening attachments that contain malware or clicking links and giving away our personal data. And then there are mails that try to lure us into scams or hoaxes. Most email users find spam frustrating and annoying, and unfortunately there is a lot of it: A 2020 study showed that spam messages accounted for almost 54 percent of global e-mail traffic. Email spam blockers are employed to keep such messages from reaching email inboxes.

There are two good ways to keep trusted senders out of your Spam folder. First, add them to your email address book. And second, place them on your list of accepted senders, called a “whitelist.” In your mail.com account, you’ll find it under > E-mail Settings > Whitelist. Simply type in the email address of the trusted sender and click > Save. You can also whitelist entire domains, e.g. mail.com, and all addresses from this domain will arrive in your inbox or other designated folder.

The mail.com spam filter applies frequently updated parameters to designate emails as spam and automatically block them from your inbox. This includes:

• Using checksum algorithms to identify unsolicited bulk emails
• Analyzing emails for technical properties and errors that are typical of spam
• Checking for fake sender address, i.e. was the email actually sent from the server associated with the domain name in its address
• Comparing IP addresses and URLs with internal and external lists of blocked senders