Junk mail and spam are a big problem for many people. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that email becomes ineffective compared to other communication options. Deleting your entire email account is an option, especially when you receive 100 spam messages for each actual one, making it a real burden to even use your email service. But there are a few options for dealing with spam.

For starters, you should stop using a single email account for everything. You never know who will pass your email address on to everyone else when you use it to sign up for a forum or to get more information somewhere. Start creating more than one email account to keep different things separate.

You should also keep a separate one for personal use that is never used to register online. This makes it less likely that someone will find and use your email to send you things you don’t want to have. Set up a number of other email accounts to sign up for websites, deals, newsletters, and other things.

A big mistake that many make is that they validate their email address to a spammer. They get an email that they don’t want and they look for the unsubscribe button. Many times this alerts the spammer that you are a real person with a real account. At this point, you will start receiving more emails. It is much better to filter the email without revealing who opened and read it than to interact with the links in the email. There are ways the spammer knows that you clicked on the links in the email, so it is important that you never do so to avoid receiving more spam.

Using these techniques should help you reduce the junk and spam you receive on a daily basis. By eliminating unwanted spam, you can classify your email much faster and help keep your mailbox much cleaner.