There are generally two types of unwanted emails – those that you receive from legitimate senders who do their best to make sure that they comply with the law and those you receive from people who don’t care that they are breaking the law.
A reputable sender with a reputable business website will do their best to comply with the law as it applies to sending e-mail messages. One such requirement is that business e-mail messages should include a process for you to unsubscribe from the business’ mailing list. So, if you receiving unwanted e-mail messages from a reputable sender, look at the foot of the email message for a link you can click to unsubscribe from the list. In most cases, when you click such a link, you will be taken to a website and immediately unsubscribed from the mailing list.
However, unscrupulous senders either won’t provide you with an unsubscribe link or, if they do provide you with one, it probably won’t work and it might just confirm to the sender that your email is a valid one so you’re likely to receive more unwanted email and not less in future.
In this case, instead of clicking unsubscribe, you can tell Microsoft Outlook that these are messages you don’t want to receive in future. So, for unwanted emails that you receive from reputable senders, unsubscribing is the best option to use. If the messages are from people you suspect are not legitimate, then letting Outlook deal with them is the better alternative.
This will block the message sender so that any e-mail messages that you receive from them in future will be dealt with as junk email – in most cases this means the messages will be moved automatically to your Junk e-mail or Spam folder.
Take care to only do this when you never want to see another message from this sender in future.
