TCOBaG – kNow ThiNkIng AllOwEd

Okay, so I had a few questions/comments come in about using the ‘report as spam’ button.

Look, I know it’s easy, and sometimes you get that little ‘ooo, that’ll teach them’ feeling, or you really just are lazy and/or think ‘this is crap, I asked for it, but this stinks’ feeling, but you really need to use a little caution here.

Here’s a reply I made about this:

No problem marking real spam as spam, and if you did not ever subscribe, do not hit the unsubscribe button as that will only confirm to the spammers an active email address and most likely not remove you from the list. But if you subscribed, find the unsubscribe link and use it. If that doesn’t remove you with 48 hours, report it.

However, you really need to be careful in two ways:
1. If you’re forwarding other email addy’s to Yahoo! or gmail and report it as spam, the service provider is marking ‘your’ email as the sender. Just delete those.
2. If you’re not sure, don’t recall, then just delete.

gmail also uses user actions to ‘learn’ what’s spam. It’s not really new technology.

Bottom line is simple.

If you subscribed, do the ethical thing and unsuscribe. Give the system a chance to work for you.

If you did not subscribe, and you’re really sure about that (look at the bottom of the email message where most good, ethical email marketers often include such information for things like possibly your IP address, a date, time, from when you subscribed), then report it.

Also, regularly check your spam and trash folders for legitimate emails and ‘de-mark’ them. This will help train most of the better email service providers algorithms to act appropriately in the future for you, and sometimes for others as well.