Does the Sender Know if You Mark Their Email as Spam
When I get an electronic mail from someone that I practise not want to e'er hear from over again, I report information technology as spam. What really happens to information technology? Does my email service know what to do with it if it ever shows up once again? Is there whatever protection for me? Does the person that sent the email know that I put information technology in the Spam folder?
At that place's no definitive answer on exactly what happens, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.
Notwithstanding, some full general concepts employ when you mark something as spam.
The offset matter we need to know is whether you're marking it as spam in an electronic mail program running on your machine, or if you lot're using an email service'south spider web-based interface via your browser.
Marking spam in your electronic mail program
An e-mail program is software that runs on your computer and downloads letters from your email service to your local difficult disk. Examples of these kinds of email programs include Microsoft Role's Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, and the Mail program included with Windows itself. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of others.
When you mark something as spam (or "junk", as it'southward called in some programs), you lot are typically tellingonly that programme that the email message is unwanted. Particularly if your electronic mail business relationship is downloaded using the POP3 protocol, the information nigh what yous've marked as spam typically does not make its way back to your email service provider. The effect is that it does not bear upon what email will go along to be downloaded in the future.
Dedicated email programs and IMAP
Some email services now provide dedicated email programs. On my mobile telephone, for example, is an app I use to admission Gmail. Technically, that's an email program (app) running on my computer (the phone). However, since information technology'due south dedicated to handling Google Mail, when I marking something as spam using the program, the data is transmitted back to Google's servers. Similarly, I have the Outlook mobile app, and when I use it to mark something as junk in my Hotmail business relationship, that data besides makes its way dorsum to Microsoft's servers.
IMAP is used in desktop email programs to allow yous to admission your e-mail from multiple different devices and keep everything in sync. IMAP does this by leaving the "master copy" of your electronic mail on the mail server, and simply maintaining a synchronized copy of your mail service on your estimator. Change, delete, or motility mail around in folders on your PC, and those changes volition besides be reflected in the main copy on the post server.
When you lot marking an email as spam, some email programs simply motility it into a spam or junk folder. If you're using IMAP, when the move is reflected on the server's primary copy, it may be enough to notify the service that this message is spam.
There are no coating rules, and – aside from dedicated apps, like the Gmail and Outlook apps – it'southward difficult to brand assumptions well-nigh exactly how your e-mail program works with your e-mail service when it comes to spam. The best I tin can suggest is to check the help data available for each.
How email programs use the data
An email program may utilize the fact that you've marked something as spam in several unlike ways:
- It might add together the sender'due south email address to a block list. (This is a dissever part in some email programs.) Unfortunately, cake lists based on email addresses are typically not at all effective in the state of war confronting spam – spammers are constantly changing or faking their email address.
- It might add the IP address of the sender (or the sender'southward e-mail service) to a cake list. Again, IP-address-based blocking is also not constructive against spam; spammers send from millions of dissimilar IP addresses.
- Information technology might analyze the contents of the message and place diverse characteristics of the bulletin information technology then records as "looking like" spam to you. When more than email arrives with enough like characteristics, it might be automatically flagged as spam. This is the most common, and currently the about effective, electronic mail-program-based, spam-filtering technique.
Equally constructive every bit it can be, the problem with looking for characteristics is that information technology's difficult to predict what will or will not constitute spam. You might become an email that is conspicuously spam to y'all, mark information technology every bit spam, and then later get another nearly identical bulletin that was nonetheless not filtered.
These types of "learning" or adaptive filters don't necessarily act immediately, merely build upward statistical characteristics of what spam looks like to you depending on additional factors, like the number of times you mark similar messages every bit spam. It might not be until the second or third (or fourth or tenth) fourth dimension you marker a particular type of spam that the filter will accept enough confidence to kick in and automatically identify similar letters as spam in the future.
"Similar" is, afterward all, a fuzzy concept.
What email programs do with spam
Great, your e-mail program has successfully identified something as spam – now what does it practice with it?
Equally I discussed above, most email programs practice nothing more than than move the email to a Junk or Spam folder. That's it. Period.
At that place's no notification back to the sender, and no notification to the email service. Everything happened on your computer and merely on your reckoner.
This type of spam filtering is zero more than placing email detected equally likely being spam into a dissimilar folder as it'due south downloaded to your computer.
Marking spam on an e-mail service
If you're using a web browser (like Internet Explorer, Chrome, or others) to read your email, you're using an online email service. Your email is stored "in the cloud," not on your PC, and y'all're merely viewing it via a web-based interface.
Examples of web-based electronic mail services include Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo Postal service, and many, many others. Your own Isp or email service provider may likewise accept a web-based interface for your email, in addition to the services that allow yous to access it via your PC.
The important affair here is that you're using your web browser to interact with your email stored on your email service'south server.
How e-mail services utilise the data
When you mark something as spam on an online service, yous're doing essentially the same matter you did to a higher place with a PC-based email program – you're telling the service, "I think email that looks like this is spam."
The difference is that you lot and every other user of that service are all telling the provider what you lot call up is and is not spam.
Exactly how the service provider uses that information is a mystery, and that's on purpose.
For ane thing, they don't desire spammers to learn the details of the mystery; that would make information technology easier for spammers to know how to work effectually it. For another, how service providers use that information is constantly irresolute in response to the ever-changing nature of spam.
There are several approaches email service providers may or may not use:
- Things that yous mark every bit spam are used to identify and filter spam but for y'all. This is basically the PC model at the server level – yous're not impacted by the spam decisions of other users.
- Your marking something as spam goes into a single database used for everyone. Just things that everyone thinks look like spam are really filtered. No matter how ofttimes you lot mark something as spam, if anybody else on the service treats it as legitimate, yous may never see it filtered.
- Hybrid: a combination of what anybody thinks is spam plus what you lot think is spam is used when filtering e-mail destined for your Inbox.
My sense is that it's by and large the later on, hybrid approach, only every bit I said, it varies from provider to provider and changes over time.
What email services do with spam
Much like the e-mail program on your PC, when spam is filtered past an email service, it is typically sent into a junk mail folder in your account. Yous tin usually safely ignore that folder, and/or periodically cheque information technology for false positives.
No notice is sent to the sender. The email has, in fact, been delivered; it's but been delivered to your Spam binder.
Some services have things a stride further.
Some services identify spam at a global level – peradventure based on content or source or something else – and block information technology from existence delivered entirely. You'd never come across information technology in your Inbox or in your Spam folder. From your perspective, information technology'due south like the e-mail was never sent.
Occasionally, in these cases, the service sends back a bounce bulletin to the sender.
Maybe. In one case again, in that location'south no guarantee.
Faux positives
Regardless of whether yous use PC- or spider web-based electronic mail, spam detection is an inexact and ever-changing science. Yous'll meet email that you consider to be spam – mayhap even obviously spam to you – be delivered into your Inbox.
So, you lot mark it as spam and your email program or service learns a little more about what y'all consider to be spam. Occasionally, still, legitimate mail will get marked as spam and be filtered. This is referred to as a "false positive."
For anything that's been filtered and placed into a Spam folder, you should have the power to say, "This is NOT spam". This is perhaps even more than important than identifying spam.
Once again, the program or service takes this indication from you and learns from you that email like this should not exist considered spam.
That's an important pace to take. Every so often, spend a few minutes in your Spam folder looking for things that were filtered and should not have been. Marking those as "non spam" to reduce the take chances of similar mail in the future also being filtered.
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Source: https://askleo.com/what_happens_when_i_mark_something_as_spam/#:~:text=There's%20no%20notification%20back%20to,it's%20downloaded%20to%20your%20computer.
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