Beyond technical defences, it’s essential for businesses to promote strong email hygiene habits among staff. Key best practices include:
– Avoid clicking links in unsolicited or unexpected emails. – Hover over hyperlinks to verify the actual destination before clicking. – Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all email accounts. – Keep antivirus and anti-malware software up to date. – Report suspicious emails immediately to IT or security personnel. – Conduct regular phishing awareness training, at least quarterly.
Taking a layered approach—combining user education, secure systems, and smart email habits—greatly reduces the risk of falling victim to today’s increasingly sophisticated scams.
Even something as seemingly harmless as clicking an “unsubscribe” link can carry unexpected risks.
For UK businesses, this highlights the need to re-evaluate both inbound email behaviours and outbound email strategies. Marketing emails must now earn trust as well as attention, using secure, standards-compliant unsubscribe processes and being transparent about how recipient data is managed. Failure to do so may lead to emails being ignored, flagged, or reported as suspicious—damaging your brand reputation in the process.
Internally, safeguards are more important than ever. Many employees still use personal inboxes for work or operate without proper protection. Today’s phishing attacks often mimic legitimate marketing emails, making it harder to distinguish real from fake. IT teams must assume users may not recognise a malicious link—even in something as ordinary as an unsubscribe button—and design protections with that in mind.
In short, defending against email-based threats now requires more than just spam filters. It demands a culture of cybersecurity awareness, ongoing training, and secure tools at every level. The unsubscribe link—once a mark of user empowerment—has become a symbol of how even well-intended actions can be exploited if not viewed through a security-first lens.