Agree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences.
They're checking to see whether any of the links they put in the emails are being fetched from their servers. It's stupid, but it works for most people.
I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.
Only if people naively automatically load remote content. My inbox receives the bits that actually come in the email and nothing else. If you send an empty email with all images, you sent an empty email...
So they'd miss it anyway, my mail client is firewalled to only be able to access the mailserver.
I've been unsubscribed from a handful of newsletters because I don't read them. I replied to one and told them I did, even reached out on Twitter, but they still deleted me.
Have you noticed certain financial providers sending blatant marketing emails with no unsubscribe option and a comment along the lines of "these emails are not marketing"
The trick is create a filter to weed out such junk. And if a company sends me marketing fluff without unsubscribe option, then it goes in the junk/spam folder, and I may eventually discontinue my account with that service provider altogether.
Because I periodically check my sp/junk folder to see if legitimate emails got dumped there, so I eventually know who's a spammer and who's not.
Yet rife. My complaint to a major UK provide was rebuffed with the blatently false assertion that the email promoting a website refresh was an essential service email.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I already have a ton of gmail filters and folders, most of which I rarely check.
Any organization that continues to send marketing material after someone clicks Unsubscribe (with maybe a grace period of a few hours) should have all of their email considered spam for everyone by default. If they continue or ever start sending marketing materials afterwards because of some new bullshit category, all of their email should be considered spam by default as well. If their Unsubscribe process is more complicated than one or two clicks, you should be able to report this as well, and... you guessed it, I think all of their emails should be considered spam by default for everyone.
Obviously I don't expect Gmail to do actually do this (except maybe by accident sometimes lol). But I wish they did.
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 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.
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.
In Windows 10, they added a shortcut Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift to open Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever they call(ed) it). Caused me a ton of confusion and annoyance when I picked up my laptop by the corner of the keyboard.
LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.