Why Are We Still Letting Scammers Into Our Parents' Inboxes?

I get over 100 scam emails per day. Most go to spam, but enough slip through that it's become white noise to me. I delete them without thinking.

But here's what keeps me up at night: my 84-year-old father gets the same emails, and he doesn't know which ones are real.

The Problem We're Not Talking About

We've normalized email scams to the point where tech-savvy people just shrug them off. "Oh, another fake PayPal email. Delete." But while we're casually swiping away threats, there's an entire generation of people who trust that an email from "Amazon Customer Service" is actually from Amazon.

These scammers send emails from domains that don't even exist anymore. They create and burn through thousands of fake domains daily. And somehow, they still land in inboxes.

Why Can't Gmail Just Stop This?

Here's what makes this infuriating: Google has the resources and technology to do better, but they're caught in a balancing act. They argue that:

• Scammers create new domains faster than they can blacklist them

• Being too aggressive might block legitimate emails

• Machine learning filters are constantly improving (but so are the scammers)

And you know what? I get it from a technical standpoint. But from a human standpoint? We're sacrificing the most vulnerable people on the altar of "acceptable loss."

The 100 scam emails I see daily? Those are just the ones that made it through the filter. Gmail is blocking thousands more. But it only takes ONE convincing scam to devastate someone's life savings.

Who This Really Hurts

Let's be honest about who's being targeted:

• Seniors who grew up trusting institutions and official-looking correspondence

• People who didn't grow up with the internet's culture of skepticism

• Anyone who hasn't been burned enough times to develop a healthy paranoia

• People who want to believe that systems are designed to protect them

My dad's generation was taught to trust the mail, to trust official letterhead, to trust that if something looks professional, it probably is. The internet broke all those rules, and we expect them to just "know better."

What Actually Needs to Happen

For the tech companies: Stop hiding behind "it's technically difficult." You have some of the brightest engineers on the planet. If you can train AI to write code and generate images, you can build better protection for people's inboxes. The current system is designed for people who can spot scams, not for people who can't.

For individuals protecting loved ones: Here's what you can do right now:

1. Sit down with them. Show them real examples from their spam folder. Abstract warnings don't work; specific examples do.

2. Create a simple rule: If you didn't initiate contact with a company, don't click anything. Go directly to their website yourself or call them.

3. Set up technical barriers: Adjust spam filters, install browser protections, create email rules that auto-delete obvious scams.

4. Check in regularly. Ask them if they've gotten any "weird emails" lately. Make it a normal conversation topic.

5. Remove the shame. If they click something, they need to feel safe telling you immediately, not hide it out of embarrassment.

The Real Cost

Every day, people lose their life savings to these scams. They lose their sense of safety and dignity. They lose trust in institutions and sometimes even in their own judgment.

And every day, we collectively shrug and say "well, that's just how email works now."

That's not acceptable.

Final Thought

I'm writing this because I'm tired of watching scammers exploit the people I love. I'm tired of a system that works great for the tech-literate and fails spectacularly for everyone else.

If this resonates with you, please share it. Talk to your parents, your grandparents, your less tech-savvy friends. Check their spam folders with them. Set up better protections.

And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us make noise about this, the companies with the power to fix it will actually prioritize the people who need protection most.