You are doing it wrong

We all hate spam.  But I suspect that some of you out there are ruining the Internet for the rest of us.

The good thing about spam is that either by content or by source 99% or more of it is fairly easily identifiable.  Spam filters look for words or groups of words or sources or other characteristics of the content or sender to flag undesired emails and put them in the spam bin.

However, if you sign up for a newsletter, just because you don’t want it anymore that doesn’t make it spam.  I have seen tons of people do this.  Sadly, because spam filters often strive to be better they try to learn from items people manually mark as spam in order to better filter.  Many legitimate newsletters get thrown in my spam folder, not because they are spam, but because other lazy people have been marking them as spam instead of unsubscribing.

And while I’m at it… Gmail?  Just because I delete mail from a particular sender all the time doesn’t mean I don’t want to get their mail.  Stop marking them spam.  I’m deleting them because I don’t need them, not because I don’t want them.  Cut it out.  Unlike many people, I don’t keep emails that I’ll never need again ever.  If I send someone an email and they send me back a “Thanks!” reply, I delete it.  If I happen to send that same person too many emails, each of which they reply “Thanks!” to (which I like, mind you, I love when people acknowledge getting an email, that way I don’t have to ask them later “Hey, did you get my email?”) and each of which I delete, Gmail decides they must be spam since I keep deleting them and now I have to go to my spam folder every day and look for the falsely accused.

So, to recap… People, stop marking things as spam that are not spam.  Google, stop marking things as spam that are not spam.

Thank you.