[stareatgoats]

> or even if it takes too long to load

Which is not ideal, and might explain why Gmail routinely puts perfectly legit correspondence in my spam folder - again and again.

I realize this might well be a problem stemming from email clients having but one option to flag emails: spam. Ideally one should have more options - as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing (and slow loading messages it seems) are all put in the same basket.

[Semaphor]

> as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing

Those are all spam. Especially unsolicited marketing. Fuck everyone who sends that, and I hope they get banned from whatever provider they use and it kills their company. I always report all of those even with an unsubscribe link, as it’s not as if I can trust them not to use "unsubscribe" as a "send more spam" signal, they’ve already proven themselves untrustworthy by not using double-opt-in.

Though with some providers even "mark as spam" seems to be able to leak your email as they send reports which contain the message-id. Good in our case as we don’t want to spam anyone and can then blacklist the address, but bad in case you report evil spammers.

[pferde]

Do you think regular users would know, or even care about which category to use? As far as they're concerned, it's "this message bad!", period.

[vbezhenar]

That's why Gmail is fantastically bad at spam filtering. Even simple spamassassin setup is miles ahead of it. Gmail filtering is basically useless because it forces me to check spam folder and I need to look at all this spam anyway.

[gpderetta]

> scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing

it is all spam; none of us want to see any of it, why do we need more fine grained control?

[stareatgoats]

you forgot to mention "slow loading emails", and I might add "I don't remember signing up to this newsletter", or "ok I signed up to this newsletter but this article triggers me" etc.

This "users can't handle fine-grained control" philosophy is stupifying users IMO. Granted, many don't have the knowhow, but they could just use the (hypothetical) dislike button, and the anti-spam AI could in that case place little weight to their judgement call. The interested user could instead be placed on a journey to be ever more adept at identifying email misuse.

Edit: as another commenter mentions, at present these completely unreliable signals to the anti-spam software causes for example Gmail to put perfectly legit emails in the spam folder - so I have to wade through a load of junk anyway (otherwise the legit messages in there gets deleted after 30 days).

The system is broken, and people reporting irrelevant things as spam is most likely a part of it.

[account42]

The OP was talking about the unsubscribe loading too slow, not the mail. That is certainly grounds for being marked as spam.

Also "I don't remember signing up to this newsletter" is mostly a case of pre-checked "consent" to mails or companies packing on newsletter subscription as a requirement to some unrelated service. That's also spam.

[stareatgoats]

> The OP was talking about the unsubscribe loading too slow, not the mail.

OK thanks, my bad. But you also seem to miss something, namely my point: you seem to imply that I'd be opposed to users marking unsolicited or dark pattern mailing lists emails as spam, if they indeed are such. Or that the existence of such emails somehow undermines my point. But that's not it.

The overarching problem is of course spam in the first place, secondly the substandard systems that email services use to identify spam. In third place I'd place the problem I raised, that legit emails are not delivered correctly, where part of the problem seems to be that users use the 'spam' label as a dislike button.

But here's the kicker: this last problem is mainly what might threaten email as a means of correspondence, period: If I get a lot of junk then I can sift that out to get to my real messages. But if my real messages don't reach me at all then that's likely game over for the email era.

[gpderetta]

Or the ever favorite: you need to login to be able to state your preference.