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Comment by parpfish | Hacker News Reader

I use email constantly but I can’t tell you the last time I saw actual spam in my inbox

Sure, there are occasional unwanted marketing emails but those are easily dispatched with unsubscribe and/or inbox filters

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Depends on your provider. My GMail is fine, but my much older Hotmail is a spam cesspool. It's so bad I barely check it anymore the last couple of years, despite having been able to keep that email address since something like 1996. As I had "exposed" that to some email farms I probably got into some really bad spammers lists which Microsoft seems unable to stop.

I gave up on my Hotmail completely quite recently for the same reason. It seemed to just stop filtering altogether. I'd recieve somewhere on the order of 50 spam emails to my main inbox a day. If anything, it filtered more email I did want than those I didn't. I haven't had the same issue with gmail.

Spam evolved. The filters catch most of the egregious kind, but our mailboxes are still flooded with the rest: marketing of legitimate companies, which you likely interacted with at some point, however briefly, and often mixed into transactional messages. This consists the majority of most people's inbox; I bet it's the case for you too.

That's not spam. Watch what you subscribe for and periodically unsubscribe, done.

I don't subscribe for anything of this kind, and if something somehow gets into my inbox, I report it as spam and then unsubscribe.

All that is very much spam. I'm never interested in marketing material from vendors. Doesn't stop them from padding every single e-mail with it.

Then it is spam, my bad. I get next to nothing somehow maybe once a week at most...

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