When you have junk/spam in Hotmail, & you click āReport & Deleteā,
does Hotmail really report it?
Yes and no.
The intent behind that button is to reduce the amount of junk mail you might
get in the future. However Iām guessing that itās not doing what you think it
is.
The question is whoās doing the reporting, and whoās getting the report?
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If thereās a āReport & Deleteā button on your Hotmail itās there for
you to report the spam to Hotmail.
And thatās as far as the report goes.
(This actually applies to all the services ā GMail, Yahoo and so on. In
fact, Iām not seeing a āReport & Deleteā button on my Hotmail account, but
the same principals apply with the āJunkā button, āReport Spamā button or
anything else that allows you to indicate that a particular message is, in your
opinion, spam.)
Hotmail doesnāt report it to someone else, because thereās no āsomeone elseā
to report it too. Junk mail comes from many different places, and spammers
typically do an excellent job of hiding. Thatās one of the reasons that junk
mail is so incredibly difficult to stop.
your mail provider more accurately block incoming spam.ā
So if the report only goes as far as Hotmail, what good is it?
The intent is that is allows Hotmail to adjust its own spam filters. If many
people report a particular type of email as spam, then in theory Hotmail can
use that information to say āif I see email that looks like this in the future,
since so many people think itās spam, Iāll mark it as spam to begin with for
everyoneā.
Sometimes that means the mail will be redirected to your spam folder.
Sometimes that means that youāll never see the mail at all.
When used properly that āThis is Spamā button can help your mail provider
more accurately block incoming spam.
But thatās all. It doesnāt do anything about the spammers themselves, or
stopping them from trying to spam in the first place.
Now, Iād be remiss if I didnāt touch on a pet peeve of mine, and a problem
that many legitimate mailing list providers face every day. Itās that part
about āwhen used properlyā.
As you know, I publish a weekly newsletter. As Iāve written about before small
handful of people mistakenly click on
the āReport as Spamā button each week. In some cases itās an honest
mistake, as the āSpamā button might be too close to the āDeleteā button and
people can miss. In other cases itās a mistake of understanding ā the āSpamā
button is not the correct way to unsubscribe from a newsletter that you
explicitly signed up for.
The problem, as you can see from the discussion above about how the āSpamā
button works, is that a few people calling legitimate mail spam by mistake can
cause the email service to think that it must be spam for everyone. As a
result, other people using the same mail service could stop getting the email
they actually asked for, email they donāt consider spam at all, and email they
actually want.
So use the āSpamā button if you like, but use it carefully, and
know that all youāre doing is telling your mail provider, like HotMail, that
you think a message should be considered spam for everyone.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but isnāt Gmailās filter individually trainable? i.e. things you reported spam are immediately blocked from your account.
I get ads from some watch companies, I guess because I was researching watches a couple of years ago. Same thing with interest rates. I mark them as spam, but they keep coming back.
How do I stop these things?
As Leo pointed out, the āspamā button doesnāt automatically unsubscribe you, automatically block mail from that sender, or create an exclusion rule based on that e-mail. So marking something as spam doesnāt stop you from getting spams from that same spammer or similar types of spam from other spammers. It just puts it in a āreported as spamā pool that your mail provider can use for reference in its spam blocking efforts.
If you want off of a mailing list you signed up for, like Leoās⦠unsubscribe.
If youāre getting unsolicited messages, create a filter that uses either the senderās e-mail address (if they use the same one regularly) or a key phrase they use in their mail regularly (such as āinterest ratesā or āpre-approvedā) to catch the mail and toss it in your junk folder instead of getting into your main mailbox.
Perhaps Leoās next article should be about setting up filters in Hotmail. :-)
This is actually not quite true. Hotmail has a service for Email Marketers called Junk Mail Reporting Program (http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP). Every person that clicks āThis is Spamā on an email gets sent to me so I can remove users from our list. We have an opt in list and you would be amazed how many people click āThis is Spamā when they asked to receive it.