Jim Rossman: Your email provider needs your help to identify spam

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This week, a reader writes, “Please tell me how to block sexually explicit emails. I block them but that doesn’t stop them.”

Yikes.

Nobody needs uninvited sexually explicit emails in their inbox.

We have all dealt with spam email messages, and they’re certainly no fun.

This reader’s email account (sbcglobal.net) is from a legacy AT&T email domain that runs on the AT&T/Yahoo! mail platform.

Your best defense against receiving unwanted email is to filter it out before it gets to your inbox.

Most big email providers do a decent job trying to filter out spam. All of them are working at it, but since we all still get some spam (some more than others), it’s obvious they could use some help.

If you look at the list of things under your inbox, you’ll notice a folder for spam, which is where your provider will funnel the spam messages it can identify.

If spam is getting past your provider’s filters, you can help by diligently marking the spam you do receive.

Every email provider allows the users to mark their spam messages and report them.

Marking messages as spam is quick and it moves the message from your inbox to your spam folder.

On a Yahoo! Mail account, you can mark spam a couple ways.

You can open the message and click the spam button at the top of the list, or you can right click on the message and choose spam from the pop up menu.

You can also look for the small check boxes to the left of each message in the list and click to put a check in the messages you’d like to select and then click the spam button at the top of the list to flag them all at once.

The last two of these methods don't require you to open the message first, which is good if you’d rather not see the offending message.

Finally, if you are getting messages from a sender you can’t identify or perhaps don’t trust, it is not recommended that you use the unsubscribe link, if there is one.

Unscrupulous companies will only use your unsubscribe response to identify you as a valid email recipient and you’ll end up on a lot more spam distribution lists.