Tips for Dealing with Unwanted Email Ads

Do you get wayyyyy too many junk emails trying to sell you something or make you rich working from home? Do you know about the law stating that every piece of soliciting email is required to have an opt-out button you can select so you no longer receive so many annoying ads? I answered "Yes" to both of these questions, so I innocently thought that as a courtesy to these people, I would opt-out of receiving their emails before I reported them as Spam. I spent 20 minutes here and there over the course of about a week clicking on the "unsubscribe" links and waited a week or so for the junk to stop. Next thing I knew, I was receiving more messages than before! So, I found this out the hard way. Hopefully you haven't made this mistake yet and my posting some information here will prevent you from compounding your amount of junk email ads.

1) The longer you have an active email, the more junk you'll receive. Your email address has been "out there" for so long that it's inevitable that it will get sold over and over again to other people and companies buying lists.
2) If you think you can just click "unsubscribe" at the bottom of these ads and that will end that, you are sadly mistaken. What really happens is that when you click the "opt-out" links and even type in your email address to confirm your removal, your email address is actually getting validated so that they know you are a real person with a working email address. In turn, your address gets filed as active and is sold over and over and over again to people and companies purchasing email addresses. Isn't that nice?
3) You can try all you want to report these unwanted ads as Spam, but as long as they are following the guidelines set forth by the CAN-SPAM Act, they will not ever get qualified as Spam.
4) The best thing you can do, unfortunately, is simply ignore them and continue to delete them regularly. If there is never a response, or a click-through to any of their links, the best you can hope for is that you go into an inactive list, where they think your email address is dormant. Eventually, they will stop sending you messages. We hope . . .
5) Basically, there's nothing you can do about it unless you are ok with starting all over again with a brand new email address. If you do decide to start over, you want to strongly consider using Gmail or Microsoft Exchange, hosting by Microsoft. They have the best anti-Spam filtering softwares. They should, right?