Don Sesler, The Technology Whisperer: As the owner, I have the honor of leading a team of super-smart individuals who share my passion for helping entrepreneurs and business owners not fall victim to complex technology challenges that can kill productivity. We want to tame your technology so that it works for you and not the other way around. What technology problem is making your life more complicated than it should be? Reach out to me and tell me your story.

Why Spam Filters Feel Broken

Why Spam Filters Feel Broken

And How To Make Them Better

If you have as much going on as I do, then chances are good that staying on top of your email is hard.  Email is an essential tool for all of us, and the spammers and hackers work very hard to steal our time, attention, information, and anything else they can get their hands on.

Spam filters that are built into the our email tools can help, but getting the security settings right is tricky. Adjust them too loosely, and the junk floods your inbox. Too tight, and important messages from clients, vendors, and partners disappear into the void known as the junk folder.

For most of us, there are two layers of filtering we want to try and dial in. The first is the service that delivers your email, and the second is the app you use. The two most common combos are Microsoft + Outlook and Google + Gmail, and there are many, many others. Regardless of which tools you use, the general principle of dialing in the filter settings is the same. It’ll never be perfect, but spending a little time understanding the options can help you save a lot of time in the long run.

I’m Getting Too Much Spam In My Inbox

Here are three things you can do:

  1. Tighten filtering at your email provider: This can catch a lot of spam before it ever hits your mailbox. If you’re seeing obvious junk, your provider settings may be too relaxed. If you are using Office 365, these settings are found in a tool called Exchange. If you are a Google Workspace user, these filters are embedded in the Gmail app. So, even if you don’t use Gmail as your email tool, you’ll want to set up the initial filtering inside that app.
  2. Tune junk settings in your email app: Outlook and Gmail let you fine-tune junk sensitivity and reporting. Inside the app, you can mark incoming junk emails that got through the initial filtering as junk to help the system learn.
  3. Highlight the dangerous stuff: When something comes in that is clearly trying to do something unethical, it is very helpful to everyone if you take the time to report it. Most email apps will offer an option to “Report phishing” or “Report junk”. Once that’s done, you’ll also want to block the sender.  It’s a few extra steps but it will definitely improve things over time.

Important Emails Are Ending Up In The Spam Folder

Here is what you can do in this case:

  1. Add key people to your contacts / safe senders: Checking to see if someone is in your contact list is one of the checks the app will do as part of its process, so having them in the contact list will reduce the risk of the email landing in the spam folder.
  2. Mark the email as “Not junk”: This trains the filter and improves the odds the next message lands correctly.
  3. Loosen email provider filters only when necessary: If you go too far, you’ll be back to inbox chaos. Adjust gradually, then monitor for a week.

Can AI Help?

Tools like Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini can be useful when working with email, but their strength is helping to summarize long emails or write draft responses. For now, I’d advise against asking them if an email is legit. There’s a good chance they’ll get it wrong.

Pulling It All Together

Zero spam is not a realistic expectation for the foreseeable future, but if you spend a little bit of time tweaking the filters and training your email app, you should be able to improve the filtering so you waste less time, miss fewer important messages, and reduce your risk exposure.

If you want help getting your email flowing smoothly (and safely), book a free consultation and I’ll help you tune this so it works for your business.