The corporate version of video-uploaders writing "no copyright infringement intended", except with less an an excuse for not knowing better.

"For Off-road Use Only"

They go in the junk folder and then get marked and reported as spam.

Dangerous, since this invites genuine service emails to be junked.

I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.

It proved not fine for me on an occasion of missing a service email and losing an account as a result.

If you lose an account due to negligence, it's on you, not the service provider.

Spam/junk folder is not "ignore" folder. You need to periodically check the contents of the spam/junk folder to see if any legitimate emails fell into that waste basket.

But the suggestion "get marked and reported as spam" can lead to future mails getting junked before even reaching the spam folder.

Agreed.

That "Mark as Spam" facility not only moves the offending message into Jink/Spam folder, it also allows the Email Service provider to identify that type of email as spam, so future incoming messages that match that may criteria can be categorized as spam, so they'll go into spam folder automatically, rather than into the Inbox. You can find them in the Jink/Spam folder.

However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.

So you need to be careful what you "Report as Spam". It is different action from "Mark as Spam".

"Report as Spam" may also prompt the user to "Block sender", so one must be careful not to block legitimate senders, though this action can usually be undone, as the Mailbox Settings will track the blocked senders so that lost can be corrected by the user if needed.

Gmail has a good trick that most users don't know or notice: In the Spam folder, the user can see a warning at the top of each email that explains why Gmail sent it to Spam.

So user can figure out why legitimate emails got wrongly flagged as Spam, and can prevent such future legitimate emails from falling into Spam folder: User can do this either by adding the sender to Contacts list (Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Spam folder), or by creating a filter to identify and action that message (flag it as Important, or label it with a custom category label, or move it to a specific subfolder, or forward it to another email ID).

>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.

This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When companies like Walmart or Paypal or LinkedIn or Comcast or whoever spam thousands or millions of people, if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.

> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer

Or you got hacked by a spammer.

> even if you also happen to send legitimate emails.

And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email.

> if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.

Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPal email is far more important than being protected from PayPal spam, prevented from employing my own protection.

One size does not fit all.

Google relies on ad-revenue.

And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.

So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.

Sure, you can manually unmark them as spam, and gmail should respect that preference as well. But for the rest of us, it would be an improvement if Paypal was sent to spam by default until they were forced to stop sending spam.

> (Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Spam folder)

Oh?

My bad. I meant to say: "Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Inbox (they won't go into Spam folder)" (even if you had marked earlier emails from that sender as spam, but later added that sender as a Contact, so thenceforth they'll get treated as legitimate emails, not spam). But if you have some filter for that Contact, that takes precedence.

I would say the base problem is that said organization sent you spam and then disconnected you, rather than the spam filter.

The disconnection was the fault only of the spam filter hiding the service mail.

I mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.

This is not you marking them as spam. This is "all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam".

Right, and I think that if they send spam, all email providers (especially gmail, the largest provider) should mark all their emails as spam by default. They are doing what is described above at a large scale, so large-scale reactions are needed.

Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.