[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]

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