How to stop cold sales emails reaching your business inbox

If your business has a website, a Google Business Profile or a listing in a directory, your email address is on dozens of sales lists. The result is a steady stream of offers to fix your SEO, redesign your website, find you leads, build you an app or sell you software. Most of these are sent one at a time by real people, which is exactly why they are so hard to stop.

Why they keep coming

Cold sales emails are cheap to send. Tools scrape business addresses from websites and directories, and a single salesperson can send hundreds of personalised messages a day. Because each email is written to look like a genuine enquiry, often mentioning your business name or website, it looks like normal email to most spam filters.

Many of them also follow up two, three or four times if you don't reply, so one sender can become several emails a week.

What doesn't work

• Replying "not interested". It confirms your address is read by a real person, and that address is often shared or sold on.
• Blocking senders one by one. The same campaigns come from new addresses and new domains all the time, so the list never ends.
• Clicking unsubscribe on everything. Genuine companies will honour it, but in a scam email the link simply confirms your address is live. Only unsubscribe from companies you recognise.

What helps

• Use a contact form instead of showing your address. Scrapers find far fewer addresses when your website uses a form.
• Use a separate address for listings. A dedicated address for directories and suppliers keeps your main inbox cleaner and shows you where the junk comes from.
• Set up rules for repeat offenders. Microsoft 365, Outlook and Gmail all let you create rules that move email from a sender or domain to a folder. This works well for a handful of persistent senders.
• Report obvious spam. Marking email as junk in Outlook or as spam in Gmail helps your provider's filter a little over time.

What UK law says

In the UK, marketing emails are covered by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Companies can generally send marketing emails to limited companies and other corporate bodies without asking first, as long as they say who they are and give you a way to opt out. Sole traders and some partnerships are treated more like individuals, so unsolicited marketing to them usually needs consent. If a sender ignores your opt-out, you can report them to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

In practice, the law rarely stops the flow: many cold emails come from overseas, and the rules allow most business-to-business outreach anyway.

Stopping them automatically

The manual steps above reduce the problem, but they take time and they never finish the job. Optima Mail Guard does it for you. It works behind the mailbox you already use and moves cold sales pitches, SEO offers, scams and phishing into a separate folder as they arrive, so the first thing you see in the morning is real work from real customers.

Nothing is deleted, anything moved can be put back with one click, and genuine enquiries stay in your inbox. It works with Microsoft 365, Outlook, Gmail and most other business email, and you can try it free with 1,000 email checks.