Should I move misdelivered email to the bin or spam?

April 16, 2019 12:20 AM

My Gmail account receives email from two email addresses. Unfortunately I get a lot of mail sent to the Gmail one even though I never give it out. Since I can't disable the address, should I move email sent to the Gmail address (and only the Gmail address) to the bin or spam?

I have my own domain and email alias which redirects to a Gmail inbox and Gmail is configured so that my Gmail address is never seen or used by me. I have never given out the Gmail address.

However that doesn't stop other people from handing out my email address out as their own. As a result I get a lot of personal mail, mailing list content and bills.

After a year of being polite and chasing the people down, I'm fed up of idiots giving out my email address so I've automatically redirected anything addressed to the Gmail address to the bin. This works great.

However I'm wondering if I should redirect to spam instead? Would that be better or worse?

posted by mr_silver to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

The people mailing this address don't know it's the wrong one, so it hardly seems fair to flag their messages as spam, especially if it may get them incorrectly tagged as spammers. Plus doing this would in some small way be polluting Google's spam-detection algorithms, making them less effective.

Personally I'd direct the messages to a mark-as-read folder, then check it occasionally to see if anything critically important got through so I could try to let the intended recipient know. But I don't blame you for not wanting the extra hassle -- in that case, just keep trashing it.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:21 AM on April 16, 2019

I do not think those emails are spam. They are, however, trash. Keep sending them to the bin. (Although, Rhaoklki's suggestion of sending them to their own tag and marking them as read while skipping the inbox is a good one.)
posted by AugustWest at 2:00 AM on April 16, 2019

My rule of thumb is if it’s a company/website sending it, then they should have required a verification link be clicked before accepting that as a valid email so those get classed as spam. Individuals, I’ll just trash.
posted by juv3nal at 2:51 AM on April 16, 2019

(I mean unless the company/website email is actually the email with the verification link of course)
posted by juv3nal at 2:52 AM on April 16, 2019

I don't know how wedded you are to keeping this particular Gmail address (for the archives you already have there) but you could also pick a new, less name-like Gmail address and migrate over to using it as your back end. Way fewer people are going to accidentally give out [e-mail] as their sign up email than will give out [e-mail].

But I agree with others. The bin is better than spam, because most of those email will not be spam and incorrectly marking them as spam will mess with the spam filters (including likely causing valid email to your other account from those same sources to be marked as spam) and potentially cause problems for the sender who wasn't the one who caused the problem.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:24 AM on April 16, 2019