What is SPAM anyway?
Some may define spam as unwanted email, or junk email or even UCE (unsolicited commercial email). Wikipedia has a definition for spam and some history on types of spam.
For this site I’m defining the following types of email as spam:
- Commercial email advertising a business or service you haven’t done business with previously or isn’t affiliated with a company that you gave permission to have 3rd parties contact you.
- Basically any commercial email from someone that has no business emailing you.
- Unsolicited email promoting religion, a political candidate, or anything. Sometimes politicians share mailing lists and in these cases it’s generally best to just unsubscribe.
- Scams, phishing emails, and the like. I include these because you can use the same methods to stop and report these types of emails as you do spam.
What this site isn’t considering spam:
- Email from businesses or web sites where you provided your email address to them.
- Joke emails you don’t want from that one friend that just won’t stop and has nothing better to do.
- Negative feedback on your business, or any legitimate email that you simply don’t like.
Please do not report emails that aren’t spam.
Often reports will be read by a human and hopefully they will be so action is taken. Do you really want to report non-spam emails about your life to someone as spam?
Heed the story of Dick.
There was an email user, we’ll call him Dick. He would get complaints from customers, or just email he didn’t want, or sometimes he wouldn’t remember signing up for a well known website or was just too tired to switch between the spam and delete button.
This wastes the time for those fighting spam having to review bogus spam complaints and doesn’t help you out so don’t be Dick.