Am I Wasting My Time Reporting Scam and Spam Emails?

❎ Reporting spam in your email program with the spam button is critical. Reporting it by forwarding it somewhere just isn't going to do any good.

❎ Reporting spam
Mark spam using your email program’s “spam” button. This crowdsourced reporting helps improve spam filters. Forwarding spam to agencies or anti-spam services, however, is ineffective because of modern spam tactics like botnets. While it won’t hurt, it has little impact. Focus on marking spam locally.

Chapters
0:00 Am I Wasting My Time Reporting Scam and Spam Emails?
0:30 Yes
0:55 The war against spam
1:20 Reporting spam versus reporting spam
2:25 Reporting by submitting or forwarding
4:10 Spam comes from everywhere
5:15 Speaking of bots…
5:55 When reporting spam might help

More Ask Leo!

#askleo #spam #reporting

[phillipcunningham]

One spam that I make sure that I forward it to the reporting place is SPAM that has phone numbers in it that look valid, as chances are a scammer will answer the phone if you ring them.

[skwira]

I agree. I used to do this in the late 90s and early 2000s. I gave up on this. I make sure I mark what is spam and what is not spam.

[etherburner]

Always appreciate your to the point information which is always highly accurate. Thank you, Leo!

[garyh]

I just cleared my spam folder of 600 spams just from the first of February. My email provider allows me to block spam by email address and other filters. But the next day, I get more from the same addresses. It's useless. The only way I have been able to stop it is to block everybody except those in my contact list.

[dudmanjohn]

Another one to avoid is to follow a link that says 'Unsubscribe'.

[GiveMeMyStapler]

3:20 - love the stock footage of a remote spammer in a dimly-lit room at a computer, wearing all black, a ski mask and gloves 🤣

[rongreve]

Spam from non-email servers should be easily blocked by spf and dkim. Spf checks whether the domain name has en entry and which email server is allowed to send email for that domain. Which means since your ip-address is not listed it would be blocked. Dkim checks that the public key listed in the DNS of the domain matches the one that signed the email. Now if there is no signing or no spf or a mismatch, the messages should go into the junk folder (or completely blocked).

[gjoseph]

While trying to think of what you're saying, I remember receiving unwanted and somewhat strange text messages to a mobile number line on a flip-phone. I had found some directions online (actually, on YouTube) saying to "forward" the message as SPAM. Eventually, after a few weeks of consistently forwarding these text messages, these unwanted/strange messages stopped coming to me.

[frenchcreekvalley]

I'm getting lots of bad hits to my website from Poland over the last year or so. Feels like they are into this spam/scam stuff big time.

[JigsawPuzzleConnection]

Before Spectrum took over from Time Warner I never got junk emails. Now I get them all day long. I just put them in the trash. Never hit unsubscribe as you will get more.

[writerpatrick]

Usually by the time you report a scam e-mail, 100 people have already done so.

[LarcR]

Guess maybe I'm just lucky, but I get more spam in the little I get via USPS than I do by email and my phone combined.

[juliaevans]

I find a lot of genuine, but possibly circular, get caught up as Spam. Hoping clicking on 'Not Spam' may reduce this.

[louf]

Spam used to be an annoyance, but is now almost a relief from scam. There is probably more scam in spam folder than spam.

[willtopower]

I get most spam with a gmail address, I contacted gmail, they gave me an address to report but first wanted my credit card information, maybe a scam too. I just keep deleting them.

[kimmyksbro]

Reporting spam
Mark spam using your email program’s “spam” button.

[janem]

i can't even report it in my possible hotmail junk box. it does nothing when I select the emails and try to action it. so i just end up deleting.

[kimmyksbro]

Its waste of time to report phishing in Gmail?

[stephenbrown]

At 1:20 you say "reporting spam vs reporting spam" -- hmm?

[azrobbins]

I have had a Gmail account since 2007, and have used it as my only email address for everything since that date. I only get about 5 spam emails per month, and they are all sent to my spam folder. Is this unusual, or does Gmail delete spam before it gets to my spam folder? I don't have any custom filters set up.