What Actually Happens When You Report Something As Junk?

When you open up your inbox, you may have a few emails that you actually need to address ― along with dozens of spam and junk messages that you did not ask or want to receive. Maybe your texts are flooded with them, too. According to a report from the spam blocking company RoboKiller, people received more than 47 billion spam texts in 2021.

Spam messages can be a distracting nuisance to see, but instead of simply deleting or ignoring these advertisements for surprise lottery winnings or sketchy business proposals, you should consider going one step further: reporting them as junk.

That’s because every time you report a message as junk or spam, it teaches your email or phone provider what spam looks like. And in the long run, that will help reduce the spam that ends up reaching you. As Gmail notes on its help center guide: “As you report more spam, Gmail identifies similar emails as spam more efficiently.”

When you report something as spam or junk, your messaging system will review the sender, subject and text, said Pierre-Martin Tardif, member of the IT professional organization ISACA and a professor at Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec.

If you and other users report multiple spam messages from the same address, your mailing system may even block all mail or texts from that sender, he said. With enough spam reports, certain addresses can end up banned as a result.

“If the sender’s email system sends a tons of junk mail or spam, it can be added to a blacklist, preventing the sender’s email system from sending email to other systems,” Tardif said.

You can check if your own domain or IP address got blacklisted by checking MxToolbox, a free online blacklist check tool.

How to report spam messages

Most email services,