Why you should never, ever delete your spam email

Unsubscribing can also potentially trigger ransomware attacks.

- BY STEFFEN ZELLFELDER

Spam and phishing emails are an annoying everyday occurrence that everyone is probably familiar with and finds annoying. These intrusive messages often clog up your inbox and require tedious deletion or filtering. Worse still, those who are act carelessly run the risk of falling victim to scammers (fave.co/4lu8Rlb). But, as strange as it may sound, spam emails can actually be useful to the potential victims scammers are targeting, which is why you shouldn't delete them.

WHY YOU SHOULDN'T DELETE SPAM EMAILS

All major mail providers are starting to rely on complex and adaptive spam filters that are getting better and better at distinguishing between wanted and unwanted e-mails. An important prerequisite for this learning effect: The software must be able to practice, and this is exactly what spam mails are useful for.

Instead of deleting spam mails, we recommend you proceed as follows:

If you use an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird: Manually mark relevant messages as spam (or as junk) if your email program hasn't already done it itself. This will train the software's spam filter and you will (hopefully) have to deal with annoying spam mails less and less in future because the automatic filter will improve.

If you retrieve emails with a browser: Depending on which provider you use, you can mark the annoying messages as spam in different ways. Of course, you only need to make this effort if the junk emails are displayed as normal emails in your inbox and haven't already ended up in the spam folder. You can mark such messages in the inbox (tick the box) and send them directly to the spam folder using the Spam or Junk option in the menu bar. This also works with individual (open) emails, where the path to the spam bin is sometimes via a Move button located above the message text.