Not everyone delves into the dark depths of their Gmail spam folder, but for those that do: Have you ever wondered why Gmail marked a particular email as spam?
Now you can easily find out, as each email marked as spam now displays a little message box at the top that explains to you why it was thrust into your spam folder.
The Gmail team announced this on their blog Monday evening:
Starting today, we’ll be showing a brief explanation at the top of each of your spam messages. Simply look at any message in your spam folder and now you can find out why it was put there and learn about any potentially harmful content within the message.
We hope that this is not only interesting, but also helps you learn about scams and other harmful messages that Gmail filters out. Whether you prefer to leave your spam folder untouched or do some educational digging, the information will be there for you.
Gmail will display a variety of different messages for why an email was marked as spam. For instance, I just got one that said “Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links or reply with personal information.”
Or it might say, “Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.”
Other reasons that might arise involve Gmail being unable to verify the authenticity of the sender, or multiple other users having marked similar messages as phishing scams. If you click learn more, you’ll be taken to a Gmail help page with more information on spam emails.