junk mail - any point?

all of these "mark as junk" buttons in hotmail and elsewhere -- do they serve ANY purpose?

i have my junkmail filters set high, but w/e lands in my inbox lands in my inbox. i am under the impression that spammers create new "IDs" with every single mailing, so how does flagging something ever do anything?

i just delete stuff piece-by-piece. nothing against "mark as junk" but it seems to be the human appendix of the modern age.

 

Most email services have a maximum limit for how many urls can be listed in the junk mail folder. When that limit is exceeded, the service will do one of two things: either delete the first entry, and allow the inclusion of the most current one you just set, or, what seems to be happening in your case, just not accepting any more entries after the maximum number has been set. So, I think all you can probably do, is go through your list of urls that are listed in the junk mail folder, and delete the ones you think are old and not going to bother you any more. Not a very good solution, admittedly. I wonder if there's some way you can increase the number of allowed urls in the list. Take a look at your "options" or "preferences" settings for your email service.

 

My ASSumption* was that if enough users marked a particular piece of mail as spam, then the web-based mail service (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) would presume it to be spam and move it to the spam folder for everyone else's benefit. But I don't have anything to back that up...


* and we all know what happens when we assume things...

 

Because spam content varies so greatly, URLs contained therein are constantly changing, and sending email addresses are almost always spoofed, many anti-spam systems determine whether a sender is legitimate or not by IP reputation. Because most spam comes from botnets, it's an on-going struggle to identify and black list spamming IPs. Once an IP is blocked, its only a matter of time until another computer on the internet is newly infected and starts sending out spam. Email service providers probably have different anti-spam systems but, by submitting a message as spam, you are probably reducing the reputation of the sender's IP address. Even if you are getting what appears to be the same piece of spam over & over, if you look at the mail header, chances are it's coming from a different source IP each time.

 

I think that may have been what I was trying to say earlier... unsuccessfully. :-o