Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.
replyI tell my friends and family to never click unsubscribe links, unless they had proactively subscribed. Buying something from a company that requires an email does not count. unsolicited marketing emails are spam and should be treated as such. Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com.
reply> Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com
replyThat’s typically not a disguise but a clear means of indicating that you can reply to the email
No, sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filters. Marketing@company.com would work for the allow replies purpose.
reply> sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filters
replyThat is not how spam filters work.
If I've interacted with a specific email address, like support@company.com, my email provider will put them in my inbox.
replyHow is it not a disguise? It means you can't block marketing emails without also blocking the legitimate support emails.
reply"Report spam" is quicker and easier than "unsubscribe".
replyGmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.
Pretty sure hotmail/outlook also has the same sort of popup for spam reports. I think accidental would be kind of hard with that popup.
replyDoes gmail still insert ads in the free tier? That would be a reason to keep people reading as many emails as possible.
reply> Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers
replyUnfortunately close to 100% of the spam I'm flagging causes this popup now :-/
I'm getting a dozen spam a day now on my Gmail account ... I think they're losing the battle.
Agreed. I was an early outlook.com user (was working at MS when it launched, I think internal users got slightly early access allowing me to claim a nicer name than my Gmail) but despite having well over a decade of accounts tied to it got so angry at certain messages never appearing that a couple of years ago I reversed the flow of forwarding and swapped to another account as my primary.
replySounds like it's gotten even worse.
I always thought of outlook.com as a rebranding of Hotmail (which itself had been continually evolving, was probably actually “Live” at that point), I would expect it is the same (ever evolving) infrastructure.
replyIn which case, people like me with an @hotmail.com address from the 90’s were much earlier users of the outlook.com email boxes than when the domain was “launched” by Microsoft.
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