Many spam messages also use what’s know as obfuscation. Ever received a bogus email about an unauthorized transaction from a site you don’t use? Click on the associated “Report it!” button and it might generate an email for you to send to a dozen or more addresses. One of them is the spammer, and the others are bogus. Quite often those will all be @gmail.com addresses.

Part of the reason is that Google’s Gmail service is so darn popular. How popular? The latest information suggests that it hosts well over one billion email addresses. Yes, that’s billion with a “b”.

Like other super-popular sites, Gmail is so busy that it’s impossible to monitor individual accounts. There are systems that analyze mail usage and try to identify — and shut down — spammers, but as you might expect, that’s a really tough problem.

A better strategy is to use the anti-spam features in your email program of choice. If you’re using Gmail, it already has a splendid spam filtering system that’s based on people accurately reporting when they do receive spam.

Apple Mail on your Mac also has a good anti-spam system. Start by going into Settings > Junk Mail and ensuring that “Enable junk mail filtering” is enabled. With that turned on, do your very best to flag junk email as spam so that the filter can learn and improve its filtering capabilities. You can learn more from Apple directly if you go here: support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mail/mlhlp1065/mac

Spam is a scourge of the digital age, whether it’s via email, text messages, call-center or AI-powered junk phone calls, or even letters sent to people’s homes that seem legit but aren’t. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse so ultimately your best strategy is to become very, very skeptical and be quick to delete things that seem fishy.

Good luck. I suspect we’re all going to need it.

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since the beginning of the Internet. He runs the popular AskDaveTaylor.com tech Q&A site and invites you to subscribe to his weekly email newsletter at AskDaveTaylor.com/subscribe/ You can also find his entertaining gadget reviews on YouTube at YouTube.com/AskDaveTaylor.