There is so much stuff to deal with online that none of us can learn it all. But here’s one thing I think you should understand: the difference between email you don’t want and “spam.”
I found out from my students that lots of them were marking notification emails from our class website as “spam”—because spam is email you don’t want, right?
Nope.
Spam is not just unwanted email
Email you don’t want could be…
A note from your parent asking you to clean your room? Not spam.
How about a message telling you that you now owe $11,536 for an overdue library book you checked out when you were two? Not spam.
An autoresponse from a contest you entered saying you didn’t win? Not spam.
Notifications that a new message was posted for your online class? Definitely not spam.
Spam is email you didn’t ask for
Does that sound like a “distinction without a difference”? Well, it’s not.
Spam is mass-produced emails that are sent out to email addresses that the spammer bought or were scraped off the Internet in various ways. You have no existing business relationship with the spammer.
Bad spam just tries to sell you stuff you don’t want.
Extra-bad spam tries to steal information when you click on links.
Extra-dextra-bad spam hurts your computer if you click on links and/or attachments.
What happens when you mark email as spam?
Your email system probably has a way to mark email as spam. Maybe you have a special folder you drag it to, or an icon you click. In any case, when you do that, your email app no longer shows you those emails.
Cool!
But it does something extra: It sends out a message to other spam filters and says, “Hey, this kid marked this sender as a spammer.”
If enough people do that, then a perfectly honest company, teacher, library, or (horrors!) parent gets on a “known spammers” list. And then when they send emails to other people who want their emails, the email will be caught by spam filters.
How can you keep so much stuff out of your inbox?
First of all, unsubscribe if you can. All legitimate email lists have an unsubscribe button on them. If you get email from an organization you interacted with, then use their unsubscribe button to stop hearing from them.
If you have to receive the emails but you don’t want them in your inbox, you can make a rule to sort them.
I don’t know what app you’re using, so you’re going to have to do a little searching. But don’t worry, it’s easy!
Search for "set up email filtering rules YOURAPPNAME."
Follow the instructions.
For example, I use Apple Mail, so I just go into Preferences, then into Rules, and I make a rule. I have rules to put certain types of emails into different folders, where I only look at them when I want to.
It makes my life SO much easier!
Try it.
And remember:
It’s not spam if you signed up for it!
Related article: Notes about Netiquette