HACKER Q&A
📣 DoreenMichele

Please explain this spam folder weirdness to me like I'm five


I asked in writing to be unsubscribed and this was ignored. So the next time I got email from this thing, I reported the email as spam and Gmail gave me a drop-down menu with the option to "report spam and unsubscribe" so I did that. I got another email from the same thing and again "reported spam and unsubscribed."

This morning I decided to check how to report abuse for the service in question. Their instructions said to forward the email in question to their abuse address.

I did that with an explanation of the situation. And I promptly got a "support ticket" reply but I couldn't find my sent email in my outbox.

I found it in my spam folder and Gmail was telling me I had reported my outgoing email as spam.

So I clicked "this is not spam" so I could have a record of the outgoing email. And it removed BOTH emails from my spam folder.

This seems not right. I want the incoming email listed as spam because it is.

But why would you list my outgoing forwarded email as spam just because I forwarded it from the spam folder? And why can't I uncouple the emails?

I don't follow the logic here at all.

  👤 brudgers Accepted Answer ✓
There is no logic there…I mean sure there is logic in the sense of computer instructions that don’t appear to crash.

But the business logic is a black box. It only aligns to your interests to the absolute minimum necessary.

Reverse engineering the black box is completely empirical.

Try a set of operations and see what happens. Repeat.

It is an ocean. It can’t be boiled.

👤 new_guy
Don't reply to spam mail, it lets them know 1, it's a valid address and 2, you'll engage with them

If that fails look up their hosting provider ( https://www.whois.com ) and report it directly to them, you can also complain to your equivalent of the ICO ( https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/nuisance-calls-and-messa... ) although they're mostly toothless.