Spam emails are the most annoying part of one’s daily life. The phone pings and you look at it anxiously, expecting a colleague’s or a relative’s email but are disappointed by an advertisement on super luxury yachts which you do not intend to buy or spend a vacation in. Heck! You are not even fascinated much by the water side! How to stop such emails from flooding your inbox? Do you have to live with it forever?
The short answer is that you just have to live with it. However, different email services have different levels of spam blocking, so you would probably see less spam if you got a new email address. First, your new address would not be on any of the mailing lists used by spammers – at least for a while. Second, you could use a service that blocks more spam, such as Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook.com
Will a switch to Gmail benefit?
It indeed will. Firstly, because it blocks spam more effectively than other emails and secondly, because it’s not hard to switch to a Gmail address, because it can retrieve emails from your old email address, and you can use Gmail to send emails from or on behalf of that email address. This is indeed a breath of relief to many. How do you actually go about doing it? Click the cogwheel on the top right, select Settings, and go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” page to set “Enable IMAP”. Remember to click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Next, click “Accounts and Import”. Select “Import mail and contacts”, it allows you to “Import from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts.” Provide Gmail your email address and password so that it can fetch your old emails.
The next option is “Send mail as”, this enables Gmail to send emails from your old email address. You can select to “reply from the same address to which the message was sent” but it is recommended to set Gmail as the default address. This will encourage your contacts to use the Gmail address rather than your old email address.