Unsolicited email

Why you keep getting unsolicited emails

Here's where people get tangled up. Unsolicited doesn't automatically mean illegal or spam. A recruiter you've never met reaching out about a role? Unsolicited. A vendor pitching software you didn't ask about? Also unsolicited. Neither one broke a law.

In the US, the legal line runs through the CAN-SPAM Act. The FTC's compliance guidance covers any message whose primary purpose is commercial advertising, and it makes no exception for business-to-business email. Senders need an honest subject line, a real physical address, and a working opt-out. Skip any of those and each violating message carries penalties of up to $53,088. That's on them, not you.

So you're not doing anything wrong by receiving it. You're just the one stuck sorting it. Every cold pitch competes for the same attention as the client email you actually need to answer, and your inbox doesn't sort by whether you asked for something. It piles everything together and lets you figure it out.

That's the sorting problem Spark is built around. Its smart inbox groups incoming mail into categories, so a stranger's pitch isn't sitting at the same visual level as a message from someone who matters.

Different kinds of unsolicited email

Not all of it deserves the same response.

Cold outreach is a real person emailing you for the first time, trying to sell, partner, or ask a favor. Sometimes annoying, often legitimate. If you do your own outbound prospecting, you're sending some of this yourself.

Marketing blasts go out to purchased or scraped lists with no personal relevance to you whatsoever. That's the difference between cold outreach and a spam email: one person picked you, the other bought your address in a spreadsheet of 50,000.

Scam and fraud attempts are dressed up to look legitimate so you'll click a link or hand over a password. A phishing email isn't clutter. It's a security problem, and it deserves to be reported rather than deleted.

Reply to cold outreach if it's genuinely relevant. Unsubscribe from the blasts. Never click anything in the third category.

How to block unsolicited email

Every major client handles this, and once you block someone, it sticks.

In Gmail:

1. Open the unwanted message
2. Click More (the three dots next to Reply)
3. Select Block "[sender]"
4. Future emails from that address route to spam automatically

Gmail's help center notes that blocking a sender doesn't retroactively clear their old messages, so you'll still need to clean those out yourself.

In Outlook:

1. Right-click a message from the sender
2. Select Block, then Block Sender
3. Everything from that address lands in Junk Email going forward

Microsoft's documentation is upfront that blocking doesn't stop delivery, it just diverts the message. The sender can still email you.

In Spark:

1. Go to Settings > Inbox > Gatekeeper and turn it on
2. Choose whether new senders get screened before or inside your inbox
3. When someone new emails you, tap Accept or Block
4. To block an entire domain, open the email, tap the sender's details, then Block Domain

Spark's Gatekeeper inverts the usual order of operations. Instead of blocking people one at a time after they've already interrupted you, every unfamiliar sender gets screened before landing in your inbox. Senders never know they were declined. That's a genuinely different level of control than cleaning up after the fact.

Unsolicited email do's and don'ts

Don't reply to anything that feels off. Even a curt "unsubscribe" tells a shady sender a real human reads that address. Worse than silence.

Do use the unsubscribe link for legitimate marketing. Companies following CAN-SPAM have to honor it, and it's faster than blocking.

Don't just delete repeat offenders. Deleting buys you five minutes of peace. Blocking solves it.

Do report phishing rather than ignoring it. Reporting helps your provider catch the next attempt before it reaches you, and it feeds the blacklisting systems that keep bad senders out of everyone's inbox.

Do screen new senders up front. The difference between reactive cleanup and never seeing the noise is whether you're filtering before delivery or after.

Related terms

• Spam email
• CAN-SPAM Act
• Blacklisting
• Unsubscribe