Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter providers to become less stringent on identifying spam, not more. It’s already happening to gmail.
The Report Spam button informs both the ISP (i.e. Gmail) and the ESP (sender, usually someone like Mailchip or Mailgun) that I do not want this message in a process known as a Feedback Loop [0]. This allows the ISP to ding the ESP a bit on the reputation of their IP address (assuming enough spam complaints). It also allows the ESP to tell their customer who is sending on their platform that they are sending badly, and potentially dial back their service or shut them off entirely.
If you are sending good mail to a double-opt-in, highly intentful marketing list, then you will receive minimal spam complaints. If you are sending to people who don't want it (they didn't check the opt-in button), it doesn't muddy the water because it is spam.
That being said, there are legal requirements (CANSPAM) [1] for mail senders around the unsubscribe link, but there are no legal requirements around the report spam button, so either kind of works.
While this is a reasonably accurate picture of what happens when you hit the report spam button, you’ve left open a somewhat false dichotomy that is quite central to the mis-categorizing of marketing email as spam. Checking in the opt-in button takes on several forms, an extremely common one of which is signing up for a service where the opt-in button is in the terms or other fine print, it is not always (or even usually) a default-off explicit and separate button click somewhere. There is often, and with most good companies, an explicit opt-out button somewhere. That is what should be used before reporting spam, if we want spam filtering to remain reasonably good.
You’ve described what happens when you report spam, but not what happens in the future when more people get upset over email and reflexively report all marketing email for accounts they chose to sign up for, and opted-in to marketing email for (by agreeing to the terms), and potentially still need transactional emails for. The average person doesn’t know the difference between transactional email and marketing email, and if you follow @Old_Thrashbarg’s advice to report any email you didn’t expect as spam before adjusting your settings, then eventually we might lose those settings as companies and providers all come to the conclusion that people can’t be bothered.
You’re also suggesting that there’s some broad segment of good marketing email that people don’t consider unsolicited or even spammy, which is by and large not true. There is practically no such thing as highly intentful ads that most people want, aside from the occasional short-lived viral campaign. By definition, marketing is a push initiated by the company to sell their wares, and most people would prefer not to watch ads given the choice.
Don’t forget that Mailchimp, Mailgun, Gmail, Hotmail, and almost every other service you can name here is actively making their income from email marketing. As much as we want to, it’s going to be difficult to block all marketing email, and they all have a vested interest in delivering email, especially from the people who are paying for the service.
We are our own ESP at work and I work on the email team. When we get a (few) FBL from you, we block you from receiving any of our email whatsoever. Forgot your password or want to contact support? Oh well, we won’t spam you again. There are unsubscribe links, use those unless it really is unsolicited spam.
What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email. We send over a billion emails a month (not spam) and people’s behavior around email is fascinating.
> mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email
When a persistently spammy company compels me to open the Rules page to filter their trash, you bet I’m also going to Select-All and Report As Junk in hopes of maximally dinging their reputation. No idea if it works, but there’s one explanation :)
