Best practice to do when you receive scam emails in your inbox
It’s in the early morning, and you just woke up. You grab your phone and open your inbox. A new email subject catches your attention then you tap on it. Suddenly, your heartbeat is
racing. Someone claims to have breached your password. That scammer sends you a demand to send considerable money in the form of cryptocurrency. In the email you read, he threatens you that he’ll spread all of your secrets to your family and friends. To make things worse, this unwanted and threatening email lands in your inbox instead of your spam folder. What shall you do?
Keep calm
Yes, keep calm. Don’t click any link inside it, and open Google.com. Yes, seriously, open Google.com. Then:
- Copy one or two sentences in that unwanted email.
- Paste it to the Google.com search box.
- Submit the search.
- Observe the search results.
If you see many sentences in the search results, you must have received a scam email that passed through to your inbox. Remember, there are many scammers out there. Follow the next step.
Mark it as spam
Yes, mark it as spam. Put the sender into your block list. Again, don’t click any link inside the email. Even if the link says Unsubscribe, you must not click it. Any link inside the such email is likely opening a web page that asks you to give those pieces of information:
- Your personal identified information like name, address, and phone.
- Even worse: your key, password, or credit card number!
So, never let scam emails get anything from you. They deserve to be on your spam folder and block list.
How to prevent it
If you don’t want to receive such scam emails again, you must switch your email provider to one that takes security and privacy above everything. Among those providers, I recommend one of those three:
- Tutanota
- Proton Mail
- Posteo
Yes, all of them are paid email providers though Tutanota and Proton Mail give you free accounts with limited ability. But, if you want to try the Proton Mail premium feature for free for a month, you can sign up using my link.