I’ve talked about spam in a number of my posts yet I continue to get questions about it. When I try to help someone reduce the amount of spam they receive (you can never really eliminate it), I often find that they aren’t handling legitimate email correctly when it goes to spam. (Just a reminder: “spam” and “junk” when referring to emails means the same thing.)

What do I mean? I’m referring to what people do when they find a legitimate email has been placed in their Spam/Junk folder instead of the Inbox. Many times, people simply drag a non-spam email from the Spam folder to the Inbox. That works but it doesn’t “teach” the software anything.

Instead of dragging an email from junk to another folder, you should be marking the email “Not Junk” while it is still in the junk/spam folder. Theoretically, that should mean that emails from that particular email address should no longer go into spam.

One caveat: if you have multiple emails from the same email address and you mark one NOT SPAM/JUNK, the others will not automatically move to the Inbox. You should mark those NOT SPAM, as well.