How to Reduce Email Spam in Your Inbox

Email spam is very annoying and takes up your precious time sorting through and deleting it. There is a way to greatly reduce email spam from getting downloaded into your email program. The spam needs to be filtered at your internet provider's mail server.

Most Internet Service providers offer a webmail feature that allows their customers to check their email from an internet browser. This is very useful if you are away on vacation or staying at a friends' house and want to check your email.

Your email remains on the mail server (also webmail) until you open your email program and pull in you mail. At that point all your email has been removed from your service provider's mail server and is no longer available for viewing through webmail.

The key here is to remove all your spam right at the mail server by using the webmail feature. A majority of spam will already have been filtered by your service provider and placed in a Spam or Junk folder in webmail. But not all of it, as there will always be spam that gets by their spam filters.

Before you can do this you need to go into your email program and flag to leave a copy of your messages on the mail server and designate how many days you want your messages to remain on the mail server. The reason for doing this is so that when you pull your mail you will still have a copy of your messages on the mail server and you can now go into webmail and delete any spam.

The next time you pull your mail you will not receive any of those messages since they have already been flagged as junk on the mail server. If you do not receive any new spam then you have no action to take. You only need to sign into webmail when you receive new spam in your inbox.

This may seem like a lot of work but it's not and the results really do pay off. I use this method for all my email accounts and my inbox is a lot cleaner and quicker to read.

If you use Microsoft Outlook the steps for leaving a copy of your messages on the mail server is as follow.

In Microsoft Outlook go to, Tools, Email Accounts, View or Change Existing Email Accounts, select the email account you want and then select Change. Go to More Settings, select Advance Tab and under Delivery select Leave copy of messages on server and then select the number of days to leave them on the server.

What the above steps will accomplish for you is after you pull your email into Outlook or whatever mail program you are using, a copy of all your messages will remain on the mail server until the numbers of days you have selected for them to be deleted.

This method also allows you to pull the same email into multiple PCs' at the same time. Just remember that each PC's email software needs to be configured in the same way.