In this instructional vlog, email‑sanity expert Randall F. Dean explains why clicking “unsubscribe” on unsolicited messages often backfires: it confirms to spammers that the address is active, potentially increasing junk mail. He advises only using unsubscribe for legitimate lists you knowingly joined. Instead, he demonstrates practical alternatives: creating Outlook rules that permanently delete or block senders (including adding a Block Sender button to the Quick Access Toolbar), setting up Gmail filters and blocked addresses, and using Gmail’s “Report spam” feature to train Google’s spam filters. Dean also recommends keeping an old email account (e.g., Yahoo) as a dedicated junk‑mail sink, reserving primary work and personal accounts for trusted communications. The video concludes with a call to action for further productivity resources and a teaser for an upcoming webinar.
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All right. Hi everybody, Randall F. Dean, the Email Sanity Expert here. Um, I actually got an email today from one of my followers saying, uh, can you please help me? Why is unsubscribe not working? And I thought the easiest way to respond to this was by making a quick little video log about unsubscribe. And the really bad news that I've learned about it. Let me explain why. If you are dealing with a legitimate marketing provider, email provider, and you remember signing up with them in the first place, and you recall that you actually yourself took the action to get on that list, more likely than not unsubscribe will work. However, if you are instead dealing with a junk mailer, spammer, nefarious marketing or otherwise organization, and you click on the unsubscribe button at the bottom of that message that you never remember signing up for in the first place. You, you didn't sign up for this. You don't know how it found you. You don't know how it got into your inbox. You might have just made it worse. That's the bad news. Let me explain why. By clicking unsubscribe on that message you never asked for in the first place, that group or organization that you never reached out to in the first place, you just told that person or that organization that not only are you actively looking at your emails, you're opening them, and you are taking action upon them. And you know what you just told them? My email is active and valuable. And if they're truly not good, they will not only keep using it because they know you're taking the action, they will probably sell it to others to make a profit. To. And so using unsubscribe when you don't remember ever signing up in the first place could actually make your junk and spam problem for your primary email, work or personal, even worse. So what do I recommend you do instead? Hate to say it, I don't hit unsubscribe most of the time. I instead— let me show you something here. I'm going to go into Outlook. I make a rule. Let's say this Randy Dean guy is a spammer. Not a spammer, trying not to be a spammer, but let's say this guy is a spammer. Right-click, I come down here to Rules, and I hit Create Rule. Now I want you to show you what I can do here. I can say if this Randy Dean guy— or maybe it's the words in the subject line that tell you it's spam— then I hit Advanced and I want to hit Advanced. I want to hit Next. So it's from this person or with that subject line. I'll hit Next one more time. Let me show you what I can do. Permanently delete it. That's what you can do. You can set it up so that they— those messages are automatically and permanently deleted if you use Microsoft Outlook. There's another thing you can do. Cancel out of here. Cancel out of here. Up here is my Quick Access Toolbar.. And you can customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Microsoft Outlook by coming down here and hitting More Commands. And I actually added this to my command bar not that long ago. I want to show you something here. It starts off with Popular Commands, but you can switch it to All Commands. And I was showing this to another client the other day, and I was paging down through. And as I was going down through saying, look at all the options that you have, I got to the letter B and said, wait, Block Sender. I clicked on it and I hit Add, and now Block Sender is part of my Quick Access Toolbar. And now, so if somebody sends me something junky spammy, I can click on that message, come up here, hit Block Sender. It should block the sender from being able to send to you also. And I think both of those options using Microsoft Outlook is a much better option than hitting unsubscribe for messages and/or companies and/or e-newsletters and/or marketing solicitations you have no recollection of signing up for ever in the first place. Now, if you use Gmail, I would actually recommend you do this. Um, what you can do is in your mailbox, you can come up and go into your settings, and when you go into your settings, you click See All Settings And you can sort of do the same thing using filters. And notice it says 'and blocked addresses.' Hit your filters and create a new filter. Now watch this, I'm just making this up as I go. Dinkus@spamyounow.com. All right, now what I'm going to do is create a filter. Now it's, it's loading the emails in the background that came from Dinkus. But notice this, I can actually set it up to delete it and create the filter. And if I do that, it will set up and create a filter. Now, what's sort of funny, I got to share something with you. Um, if I go into my existing filters, let me see if I can do this here. I want to go into filters and blocked addresses. I'm happily married for more than 20 years, okay? Some dinkus used my Gmail address to set up an account. I have no idea. I, I'm trying to figure out if it might have even been a prank for Match.com. And so I started getting all these emails from Match.com into my Gmail. I don't want emails from Match.com. I have no interest for that. Rather than hitting unsubscribe because I was afraid of what happened, I created the block. I just blocked it from both of the addresses I was receiving stuff from Match. And there's one more thing you can do as a Gmail user in real time. Go to your inbox. Let's say you got a spammy message from somebody. Just click on— I'm not going to do this to PayPal because I actually use PayPal, but here's the thing. You can come up here to the stop sign and hit report spam. And by doing that, what you do is you tell Google, I never asked for this, I don't know how they got my email.. And if you and enough other Gmail users do the same thing, hitting that stop sign button, that will tell Google that's a likely spammer. And there's a very good chance that these messages will stop coming into here. They'll start going here into your spam folder automatically, and/or Google might just block them because of the power of group learning. So be very careful with unsubscribe. Be very careful with it. I would actually even argue don't use it unless you remember actually signing up for that list, news service solicitation in the first place. Let me give you one final idea for you to consider. I actually have 4 email accounts now. One is my primary work account based on my website domain provider. One is my 365 account. One is my Gmail account, and one is one of the oldest internet email accounts I have, my Yahoo account. Rather than deleting that Yahoo account when I started getting all these other accounts set up and working, I realized that I'd been using my Yahoo account not just only for work stuff, but also for some personal stuff and for some of this junk and spam stuff. And not very long after that, I realized that Yahoo account is now filled with junk and spam. So rather than turning it off and stopping using it, I switched my work email and personal email to my other locations. I kept that Yahoo account for any time I'm doing anything out on the web— signing up for a new e-newsletter, uh, you know, signing up for something on social media, making a web purchase of some type, um, anything where they're asking for a valid email address. I don't give them my work or my personal. I give them that Yahoo account. Because I basically have turned that Yahoo account into my personal junk spam filter. Try that. If you've got an old account, use that for all of those solicitations. Try not to use your work or your personal accounts because that's how they get you, and then it can get spread around everywhere. I hope this gives you and I some ideas on how you can maybe reduce the impact of junk and spam. Problem is, if you're already out there And you don't feel comfortable hitting unsubscribe. You're going to have to set up either some rules or some filters and blocked addresses, depending on whether you're using Outlook or Gmail to help avoid this problem. Okay. Oh boy. I'm so sorry. I, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I hope I at least gave you some ideas on how to do this. Let's get back into the formal presentation, finish this thing up. I just want to thank you for your time today. Once again, I'm Randy Dean, email sanity expert. If you'd like to learn more about me, go check out my website, randalldean.com. I will tell you I'm going to be posting a link to a big new webinar offering probably end of this week, early next week, and I'm recording this video right now on April 14th. So it's about OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams if you have an interest. If you like my video, please, please remember just because I'm the bearer of bad news, don't dislike the video. If you like the information I just shared here, give it a like, maybe consider subscribing. And if you'd like to get a whole series of productivity PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone, tablet usage, reducing distraction, etc., send me an email randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you a whole bunch of additional self-study resources that will hopefully make you more efficient, more productive, more prioritized, and less distracted. Thanks everybody. Hope this helps.
