How the Junk folder affects your spam filtering03 August 2026We've been making improvements to our spam filtering over the past few weeks, and there's one thing you can do that genuinely helps. When you mark a message as junk, our filters learn from it. The same is true in reverse: if something legitimate ends up in your Junk folder, marking it as not junk teaches the filter it got that one wrong. Both actions improve filtering for your mailbox and for everyone else on the server. What helps
Mark as junk. Spam you never asked for. This is the useful one, and if you currently just delete spam, marking it instead makes a real difference. Mark as not junk. Legitimate mail that was wrongly filtered. Just as valuable, and it helps us catch the cases where our filtering is too aggressive. What doesn't
Marking newsletters as junk when you originally signed up for them. The filter learns that kind of message is unwanted and can start catching similar mail you do want. There's usually an unsubscribe link at the bottom, which stops them arriving at all. Using the Junk folder to clear the inbox. If you just want a message gone, delete it. Nothing is learned from a deletion. Nothing you need to do differently unless you want to. But if you've ever wondered whether marking spam actually achieves anything, it does.
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