Marking those inbox-clogging junk emails can actually help reduce the number of spam messages you receive in the future.
When you open your email, among the messages received, only a fraction may be important or desired emails.
The rest are likely spam, which depending on the service you use, may be filtered directly into the spam folder or appear mixed with other messages.
Vague scam messages and other unwanted posts can be quite annoying and potentially also threaten your cybersecurity. Instead of just deleting them or ignoring notifications of an "unexpected lottery win," it's actually worthwhile to mark them as spam, Huffpost reminds.
Marking Aids in Spam Identification
Each time you mark a message as spam, your email platform or phone learns better what spam looks like.
Over the long term, this small action will eventually reduce the amount of spam that reaches you.
Pierre-Martin Tardif, a professor at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, tells Huffpost that when you mark an email as spam, the messaging system evaluates the sender, subject, and content of that email.
According to Tardif, the messaging system may even block all messages from that sender if enough users report them as spam.
"If the sender's email system sends a lot of spam, it can be added to a blacklist, which prevents the sender's email system from sending emails to other systems," Tardif explains.
