Attempts to gain personal information from you by pretending to be from a legitimate source are known as phishing scams. In the case of Amazon, it's actually pretty common for someone to try and send you a fake email that pretends to be from Amazon.
An example of this is when an email tells you about a purchase you didn’t actually make, which tries to get you to click on their links and enter your credentials in a fake Amazon login page.
Other examples include requests to update payment information or requests for any kind for personal information and/or login information. Chances are, it’s a fake/scam if the “from” line in the header doesn’t contain “@amazon.com”. Do note that you should also report such fake emails before you block them.
While there are a lot of Amazon scams out there, Amazon itself does send quite a few emails to your account as well, like product alerts or other advertisements. If you want these to stop, then it's best to unsubscribe using the settings in your Amazon account, but if for any reason that doesn't work for you then you can also try out these instructions:
- Install Block Sender for Gmail by clicking the “Install” button found in the upper right-hand corner of this site. The installation won’t take long. Open Gmail when it is done.
- After signing up for a Block Sender account and linking your Gmail account to Block Sender, open the unwanted email from Amazon, and click the "Block" button on the messages toolbar.
- Select the "Emails from this sender" option.
Once this is done, you will no longer receive emails from that Amazon email account. If you ever decide you want to start receiving their emails again you can simply unblock the email.
And since Amazon does send legitimate emails as well, you may want to try a different approach and instead block their ad/offer/alert emails using phrase blocking. This would then allow you to receive their legitimate emails as well, if done correctly.
