Eliminate eMail Spam and Free Up Your Time with SpamPhobia

For the past several months, I’ve been helping Gail manage her email. The majority of the time I’ve spent doing so has simply been deleting spam messages. There are a ton of them, and that’s not counting the ones she deletes herself.

As comedian and TED speaker James Veitch observes, “The internet gave us access to everything. But it also gave everything access to us.”

I have to say, I wish I could deal with email scammers in the same tongue-in-cheek way that Veitch did. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time. Instead, I have been testing out a third-party app called SpamPhobia, which blocks unwanted emails and guards against malware.

The same thing happened the next day. It was glorious.

Why You Would Need Something like SpamPhobia

You might wonder why anyone would need a third-party spam blocker. While major companies, such as Gmail and Outlook, have decent spam filters, the email accounts of many smaller internet providers (ISPs) offer little to no protection from spam.

And if you’ve ever had an experience like that of James Veitch, you understand why sometimes you need to take extra measures. At one point, Veitch received an email from a supermarket chain about a new store opening. He had never subscribed to that store’s list. And even though he tried to unsubscribe from that list multiple times, he continued receiving emails from that company.

In fact, clicking unsubscribe in scam emails can apparently result in you getting more spam. The reason why is that doing so tells the scammers you have a valid email address.

My favorite example of the futility in unsubscribing is when an email has the word “unsubscribe” at the bottom of it with no link. I have seen emails like that in Gail’s inbox many times.

And of course, this is all not to mention the actual threats that can come to you through email, such as the danger of clicking on a bad link and getting a virus on your computer.

Free and Pro Plans

Believe it or not, you can get the essential features, including support, of SpamPhobia when you sign up for the Free Plan. All you have to do is create an account and give the software permission to access your email.Under the Free Plan, you get basic protection, and SpamPhobia scans for spam once every hour. What’s more, when you first sign up for SpamPhobia, you get a 14-day free trial at the Pro level before your account reverts to the standard Free Plan.

Your other option is the Pro Plan, which costs only $4.90/month. With it, SpamPhobia will scan for unwanted emails once every minute and provide you with advanced spam protection.

The advanced protection means the software will manage your subscriptions to commercial lists, as well as detect viruses and other types of malware. I personally have found the Pro Plan to be very advantageous since the bulk of my unwanted emails come from commercial lists.

Getting Started with SpamPhobia

In addition to Gail’s email, I decided to test SpamPhobia on one of my Gmail addresses. Granted, Gmail does have one of the best spam filters out there. But I’ve accumulated thousands of emails at that particular address (many from commercial lists, as I mentioned).

To get started, I created a SpamPhobia password for that email address and gave the software access to my email account. I can revoke this access at any point.

Once inside, SpamPhobia took me to a dashboard and started sorting my inbox. It categorized all of my messages as spam, threats, subscriptions to lists, or emails that I wanted to keep.

After I signed up, a SpamPhobia folder appeared in my Gmail inbox (which of course is separate from my SpamPhobia account). In Gmail, I could view emails the spam blocker had identified as either being from a list or having a virus.

SpamPhobia Dashboard

The SpamPhobia dashboard is simple and clean looking, and you can take a quick tour of it at any point. At the top, SpamPhobia shows the percentage of wanted and unwanted emails in a pie chart, in addition to listing the number of each type of email.

As you can see below from the screenshot of Gail’s dashboard, SpamPhobia has identified 147 emails as spam and 34 as outright threats. 325 of them are lists she is on, whether willingly or unwillingly. So SpamPhobia has been protecting her from a high number of viruses since she started using it a couple weeks ago.

Below is a picture of my Gmail dashboard. While SpamPhobia didn’t catch any malware in my inbox, it did find over 6000 list emails, the overwhelming majority of which I know I’m not interested in reading.

Blocking and Allowing

In the middle of the dashboard are a Blocked List and an Allowed List. During the inbox cleaning process, SpamPhobia automatically put email addresses in my Blocked List or left them alone. I could move email addresses over to my Allowed List (and back again) by clicking the thumbs up or down under the respective “Action” sections of each list.

SpamPhobia listed my blocked email addresses in the order of how many messages I had received from each one. The highest number of emails I received from one address was 718.

Another option for approving email addresses is adding them to your “Always Allowed” box. It can be useful to be proactive about doing so in order to prevent certain future emails from being misidentified. Do note that if you add too many emails to the “Always Allowed” box, they’ll be hidden unless you scroll over. So as a general rule, it’s probably easiest to move emails within your two lists.

New Feature

In addition to the previously mentioned options, as of this week SpamPhobia is rolling out a new feature. This feature allows you to control which addresses are blocked without you even entering your SpamPhobia account. In your email account, you can simply move mislabeled spam or list emails into your inbox.

From that point on, SpamPhobia will recognize messages from that sender as approved. Alternatively, if SpamPhobia didn’t correctly recognize a message as being from a list, you can drag that message into the list folder. Then the software will learn to treat emails from that sender accordingly.

Being Mindful

After SpamPhobia is done cleaning your inbox, I recommend looking through your Blocked List to make sure there isn’t anyone there whose emails you do want to receive. SpamPhobia blocks repeated emails, and I had to move several important people over to my Allowed List.

Be aware as well that if you expect to receive multiple updates about something, those notifications could very well be blocked. This situation could look like purchasing an airline ticket (which I recently did) or even a concert ticket (something I also recently did).

Basically, SpamPhobia takes care of an annoying problem for you and saves you a lot of time. But like with anything in life, you can’t use it mindlessly.

And it is a necessary solution. Here is a real time screen capture of SpamPhobia’s user data from this past week. Only 27.62% of the emails were legitimate.

Competitors

Two of SpamPhobia’s main competitors are Unroll.me and SaneBox. Unroll.me is free, and its main selling point is that it allows you to see all the lists you’re subscribed to and enables you to unsubscribe from them. It also organizes the lists you want to be subscribed to in one place.

Something to keep in mind, though, about a platform such as Unroll.me is that it is totally free. And when a service is free, that means the user is the end product. The Unroll.me Privacy Policy actually says, “We may share personal information we collect with our parent company, other affiliated companies, and trusted business partners.”

SaneBox has no free option and does have some useful features. However, besides being more expensive than SpamPhobia, SaneBox sorts messages entirely based on who the emails come from and the subject lines. The software does not analyze the content and can therefore tend to sort emails incorrectly. It also does not offer antispam and antivirus protection.

In contrast, SpamPhobia’s two-tiered pricing model allows company leaders to help their customers in the most effective way possible. The paid tier means they don’t need to make money off of advertising, so the users are not the product. But the free tier also allows leadership to rely on their user community to continually improve their product.

Finally, with SpamPhobia your emails are completely private and secure. Company employees do not read them and are actually unable to because they don’t have access to SpamPhobia data stores. The emails are also protected by multiple layers of encryption.

Declutter Your Life

As James Veitch points out, it’s hard enough to sort through the pointless details of life to get to what really matters. No one needs spam aggravating that challenge.

Unfortunately, the United States generates the most spam out of any other country in the world. SpamPhobia could be just what you need to declutter your email and save you precious time.

Click the image below or go to https://www.spamphobia.com now and finally get control of your email inbox. Sign up for a free account for each of your email addresses separately.

Gail and I both say,

Trust us – you need this. We are overjoyed to not be wasting all that time every day on spam! Use it FREE forever, or upgrade to Pro for even more advantages.

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Jessica Mouser

Jessica Mouser is a writer, public speaker, and avid reader. She is fascinated by how a culture's beliefs shape its technology and art.

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