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It seems like a reasonable request. Just type in your email address to enter a contest or sign up for a newsletter or score a discount coupon. What could go wrong?
Ugh. You already know the answer. Online marketers can be remarkably persistent. Once you hand over your email address, you can expect to get regular deliveries of ads, come-ons, and hard sells that can be downright exhausting. And those marketers are likely to pass your address along to partners who will also clutter your inbox.
The best spam solution
How do you avoid that crushing inbox overload? The best solution is to filter those messages to a separate account, where you can keep them away from more important messages.
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That requires, at a minimum, two email accounts. Keep your current email address for regular correspondence with friends, family, and trusted merchants. Create a new, free email account (Gmail or Outlook.com) and use it for less essential stuff, like ads, newsletters, and promotions that you can scroll through when you feel like it (or ignore completely).
To set up a new Gmail account, start here: Create a Gmail account.
To set up a new Outlook.com account, go to this support page and click the "Create free Outlook account" link: Outlook for everyday email and calendars.
If you have a third-party hosting account, feel free to use that. The point is to create an address that you can keep separate from your important email.
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Creating that new account is just the first step. After that step is complete, shunting all the unwanted emails out of your primary account will take some time and effort. But trust me, that extra effort is absolutely worth it.
Here are a few things you can do right away to cut the spam load to a minimum.
1. Unsubscribe
Use the unsubscribe button to take yourself off any mailing lists that aren't useful. Each time you get a mailing from some company or organization that you really don't care about, scroll to the end and find the unsubscribe link. Every legitimate marketer has one. If that doesn't stop the flow, add the sender's address to your junk filter. In Gmail, you can also click the blue Unsubscribe button next to the sender's email address.
2. Change your address with senders
For mailing lists and other promotional stuff that you want to continue receiving, change the address to your secondary account. Find a message from the sender and look for an option to change the email address they have on file for you. If there's no easy way to do that, hit the unsubscribe button and then resubscribe (or don't!) using that secondary email address.
3. Use your new secondary address every time
Get in the habit of using your new secondary address when you sign up for anything that looks like it might result in incoming junk mail. If a service turns out to be important and worth promoting to the main account, you can use the change of address option here, too.
4. Aggressively filter
Set the spam filters on your primary account to their most aggressive setting and then monitor your Spam/Junk Mail folder for a month or two, using the Not Junk option as needed to manage the false positives.
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If all this sounds like work, well ... yes, it is. Those marketers are incredibly persistent! But in the long run, it's way easier than wrestling with an out-of-control mailbox every day.
You can get far more sophisticated with this strategy by using filters, rules, and Gmail labels to organize messages into folders. But just creating a separate account and not giving your "real" email address to untrusted correspondents should cut the junk mail torrent in your main inbox to a mere trickle.