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Comment by benou | Hacker News Reader

> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids.

I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I end up having to ping them on eg. WhatsApp. At least with a bounce, I know they did not get my email.

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It might obviate the excuse mentioned a few comments above, "I've never had a problem with Gmail, it must be on your end."

If the message is ending up in your spam folder, it's harder to shift that blame off of Gmail's shoulders.

But if it ends up in the spam folder there's at least a chance that it'll be trained out of the spam folder by people marking it as "not spam", and it provides a workaround for the people who really need it to work _now_.

I believe that the majority of the users are trained to ignore g-mail spam since it's been working good enough for most people. Unless we condition the customer to always view the spam folder it's asking them to do something on top of already checking their e-mail.

My mother would just simply ignore the spam and often times spam catches majority of the phishing e-mails too. So it's a double edge sword educating and conditioning the users to review the spam folder. Why is it the end user's job to determine what is spam and what is legitimate ?

> Why is it the end user's job to determine what is spam and what is legitimate?

Who else could determine that? I could hire you to send me emails about Viagra sales. They would not be unsolicited, because I specifically asked you to. They wouldn't be commercials, either, so they wouldn't be Spam. An automatic filter can't determine if it's spam or not, it can only take an educated guess.

Then they should do both: bounce it and also show it in a folder called 'bounced'.

Great idea. Since many of us rarely check Spam.

I wonder if the correct solution is "send an informative pseudobounced-as-spam message to sender AND put it in the spam folder", for borderline spam (which passes the other checks). Downside is it provides a deliverability oracle for spammers, but since gmail accounts are free, that's not too hard to establish anyway.

That's as a sender (even that reasoning is questionable). As a receiver, would you rather never received an important email from some org instead of finding it in your spam folder?

But you can mark it as "not spam" (and hope that it does something, I guess) while you (as the recipient) have no options whatsoever with a hard rejection.

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