What happens when you send an email to spam?
No matter how good your spam filter is, some emails always get through. Most people will ignore or delete anything that they notice as spam, others will hit the “Report Spam” button. But what does this button do?
At a minimum most email clients will place the email in a spam folder, a good email provider will also use this information to update their spam detection models and rules to prevent future spam emails from landing in inboxes.
That is helpful for the user and email provider, but what about the person (or machine) who sent the email? If it genuinely is spam, then we don’t care about them. But perhaps the email was miscategorized, or the sender wasn’t aware that it would be considered spam. They need to know if people are marking their emails as spam to correct the issue or stop sending to the address.
Luckily there’s a solution: Feedback Loops (FBLs). These are programs that large ISPs run to send back details of emails that have been marked as spam to the sender.
