Comment on In a world full of spam, and then you read this
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 1 year agoIve seen email systems with that, I’ve never seen an email system use that as a substitute for a Spam or junk flag however, I think maybe either you’re confused or have a really odd mail client
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Gmail does it. Emails from mailing lists often have a header that specifies an email address you can email to unsubscribe (you just need to send an empty email to the address). Gmail detects this header and asks you if you want to unsubscribe instead of marking as spam. If you do, it sends the unsubscribe email for you.
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
It usually a footer, not a header, in my personal experience. Also, the unsibscribe feature in Gmail is not the same as reporting as junk/spam, which Gmail still allows.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Sorry, I meant a header as in where the things like the subject line, servers it was sent via, etc. are stored. It’s a part of the email that isn’t user-visible. The unsubscribe email isn’t visible to the user unless you view the raw source of the email, but email clients can use it.
I know marking as spam isn’t the same as unsubscribing. Gmail is trying to suggest unsubscribing instead of marking as spam which is reasonable (why mark it as spam when you could just unsubscribe and never get it in the first place?)
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
You mark it as spam so that Google can add it to the metrics and stop allowing that account to spam everyone. If you just unsubscribe it only benefits you. If you flag it as spam it benefits everyone using the service.