For years I had abandoned two older emails that I used for my work due to being spam bombed. Someone told me to do the unsubscribe at the bottom of some emails. To a degree this has helped, but I can't help but feel that they now know it is a valid email and it is gonna start all over again.
Is there any surefire way to get rid of them for good? These emails are hosted on our company email server fwiw.

You cannot stop them from coming.
You can either do you best to filter them and you can deal with them as they arrive.

*You can filter them fairly effectively (but not perfectly) with a Spam Gateway Service.
I have found this is best done at the domain level but you must have your own domain name and control of the DNS entries.
There were some Spam Service Programs for other email addresses but the success and controllability may vary.
Just Google this and perhaps try them out if they so offer a trial.
Some ISP's have this already to some degree but the effectiveness is not always the greatest and the control is not very good, YMMV.

** You can also create an email rule such as in Outlook for the most frequent ones but that can PIA.
And just delete those that auto go into Junk or Trash folders.

There's no way to rid yourself of 100% of the spam emails. Like telemarketers for phones and junk mail for the postal service, it's an unfortunately inevitable fact of email life.

A robust spam filter is your best bet, with the understanding that it won't catch 100% of all spam emails, and it may catch the occasional non-spam email too.

Another good strategy is to have a "primary" and a "secondary" email. The primary email is used for close friends and family, and rarely used to sign up for anything else, besides possibly something like your online banking and other important personal accounts. Your secondary email is then used for online shopping, to create social media/forum accounts, sign up for business giveaways, etc... All the stuff that usually leads to getting spam email when they inevitably share/sell your info.

That way, your primary email has a better shot at remaining mostly spam-free, and your secondary email then relies on the spam filter to do the heavy lifting there, with less of an impact if a legitimate email gets stuck in your secondary email's spam filter.

100% = whitelist

quote:

Originally posted by SIGnified:
100% = whitelist

Even then, it's not 100%. Say you whitelist your brother's email, and then someone hacks or spoofs their email and sends out spam. That spam would be whitelisted.

Happens frequently with emails spoofed to appear to be sent from the domains of major credit card companies or banks, knowing that those are likely to be whitelisted.

Some spam/scam emails are even spoofed to make it appear as though it's your own email emailing you.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by SIGnified:
100% = whitelist

Even then, it's not 100%. Say you whitelist your brother's email, and then someone hacks or spoofs their email and sends out spam. That spam would be whitelisted.

Some spam/scam emails are even spoofed to make it appear as though it's your own email emailing you.

Fine … 99.78%

quote:

Originally posted by p08:
For years I had abandoned two older emails that I used for my work due to being spam bombed.

There's little you can do to stop them.

Part of the problem, a big part of the problem, is that the email protocol is, essentially, broken-by-design. SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) was designed back in a time when the Internet was a much kinder, gentler, more good-mannered place. As-stated by one of the Internet's early pioneers:

Postel's Law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." - Jon Postel

Naturally, as the Internet became a common thing, along came thieves, scam artists, and various and sundry other dirtbags to take advantage of that philosophy.

Sadly: While the character of the Internet has changed, the attitudes of many of the people tasked with keeping everything working have not.

There are measures that could be taken by email administrators to address many of the problems with email. One that would go a long way would involve no more than changing a couple "should"s in SMTP protocol RFC's (Request For Comment: Documents that define Internet protocol standards) to "must"s, a couple "must not"s to either "may"s, or even "should"s, and email administrators making the necessary configuration changes.

The problem there is that would break a lot of email sent by poorly-administered sites, so, being strict adherents to Postel's Law, many are opposed to making such changes.

E.g.: The SMTP RFCs state things like (paraphrasing) "sending sites should correctly identify themselves" and "receiving sites must not reject email from sites that don't correctly identify themselves."

See the problem?

The Internet gnomes have tried various work-arounds to overcome this broken behavior, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), but, because those aren't uniformly adopted and, in some cases where they are, adopted incorrectly: No receiving email server can depend upon those, either. So they haven't achieved much.

Btw: The problem with email is not unlike the problem with Caller I.D. Nor are the reasons for it.

quote:

Originally posted by p08:
Someone told me to do the unsubscribe at the bottom of some emails.

If it's legitimate "spam" that may work. But most spam is not, and hitting those unsubscribe links will accomplish only one, or both, of two things: Confirm to the spammer they have a live one and take you to a web page that will try to exploit vulnerabilities in your web browser.

A nit: If it's legitimate (e.g.: adverts from a company to whom you willingly gave your email address), it is not, technically and properly speaking, "spam." "Spam" is that which you did not request.

I do run my mail through Comcast's mail program, so I think that will keep the baddies away? It allows you to preview mail without opening it.

HIYA does excellent job blocking #s not in contact list.

My email host for 20 years has been fastmail.com. fastmail has a superb spam filter. I can’t remember the last time a legitimate email was diverted to the spam folder. And it’s very rare that spam makes it into my inbox.

I pay fastmail $25/year for my service level. Well worth it IMO. My email address is part of my ID nowadays. Glad to have exactly one for 20 years.

That reminds me – fastmail allows me to have as many as four alias addresses. I only have one though.