Reporting spam that sneaks through our spam filter (and ham that gets caught) helps our spam filter get smarter by learning from its mistakes. In addition, messages you report are parsed and read by a human, who can make our spam filter smarter much more quickly. Best of all, spam that you report is automatically added to your blacklist and ham you report is automatically added to your whitelist. (More information on whitelists and blacklists.)

There are two kinds of messages you'll want to report: false positives and false negatives.

• False Positives are messages that were marked as spam, but which are legitimate messages.
• False Negatives are messages that were not marked as spam, but which are.

Reporting mail that is already marked as spam as a false negative won't do anything; your report will be rejected, in fact. Similarly, reporting mail that wasn't marked as spam as a false positive will be rejected as well. You should only report mail that was marked as spam as a false positive, and only unmarked mail as a false negative.

Note that not all unwanted mail is spam; spam is unsolicited. If you signed up for a mailing list that you no longer want to receive, you should unsubscribe from that list rather than reporting it as spam. This is both much faster, since our spam filter can be a slow learner, and much more efficient, since we no longer have to waste resources blocking emails that could simply not be sent.

To learn how to report messages, please select the mail client you use below.