I’m amazed that some people never look in their spam folder. I’ve had people at work tell me, “Hell, no, I just delete the contents every day without looking.” These are probably the same people who never listen to voicemail even when it’s obviously connected to an unfamiliar phone number.
I look in my spam folder at least twice a day, and I often find “real” emails that I need and want. Of course, I have very strict spam filters set up at the webmail level*, so rarely does anything get through to my inbox that I haven’t intentionally whitelisted. But, for instance, last week I asked a contractor for an estimate for some work and when he emailed me, naturally it went into spam, naturally I found it there, and then I whitelisted him.
Oddly, until I recently retired, my most frequent email correspondent was my colleague with whom I shared an office. I got dozens of emails from her every day, but every now and then, one of her emails would go to spam.
A good friend’s grandson had some very serious surgery a few years ago and my friend emailed everyone in the family (and me) with a surgery update, but because of the way he sent it from his phone, the message went into spam. I waited all day for the news, getting more anxious by the minute when I didn’t get a call or a text. Then a light bulb appeared over my head and I checked spam: sure enough there was the message.
Do you look in your spam folder?
*If you want the name of the excellent email provider that I use, PM me.
I have streamlined mine to the point where I only need to give it a cursory glance once a week. I seldom find anything of value trapped I there anymore, but before I got the spam filters tuned to my needs I used to check daily and quite often found things I needed.
I can’t recall ever finding an important e-mail in my spam folder.
It’s usually “SUPPORT” claiming that they need to know where to send my $1,432.65, or someone with an unappetizing pseudonym like Mrs. Enid Holumclaw who is allegedly eager for me to possess her hot body.
I should just automatically delete them and save a minute over the course of a week.
I have important emails flagged as spam all the time. Google seems to think that anyone who sends mail to more than 1 recipient more than once a year is engaged in fiendish scams. At least once a month I have to pull an important receipt for an online purchase out of the spam folder.
I send to up 70 email address at once for mainly family stuff etc…
I had to get special permission from Google to do so.
I have never had any personal email go to spam nor any business things,
Stuff I have not signed up for occasionally.
Not much spam anymore as I have been adding filters of a while…
I get many things where I am CC’d or BBC’d, some from friends sent on their work email. Also just pvt Google email accounts. Never had a problem with that but I am not a business email address.
Maybe a couple of times a year, when I’m really bored, , unless I am expecting a message and I suspect that it might be there.
For over ten meas, I’ve had an account at yahoo.no (which is the Norwegian version), which I have used quite a bit. I have never received a single spam e-mail at that address, either in my inbox or my spam folder. I guess spammers are only interested in English speaking respondents. I’ve also never eceived a spam message at my account at mail.ru, in several years.
At work, its contents are not marked as read so I am alerted to them being there, and go in, eyeball the names to be sure they’re spam, and empty the folder.
At home, I see them on the junk folder and do the same.
I used to never really do it, but I recently signed up to be on the survey list for Disney and Universal Studios and was surprised to see one of the Disney ones in there.
I love taking surveys and don’t want to miss out on the next one, so I check more often now. I also get a laugh out the Nigerian Prince scams, so it’s never a total waste
I don’t check my personal email’s spam unless I think I am missing something I should have received. At work I check my spam daily, and think anybody who does not check their work spam is an idiot. Mostly because they know they are expecting an email from us, and when they don’t get it and call me, the first thing I say is, “Did you check your spam?” and they say “No. Oh. Here it is.”. Perhaps this should be the first thing you check when you think you should have an email but do not!
Furthermore, there’s a lot of spam machine translation and machine composition gems that I take great pleasure in reading, such as:
“Restlessness and discontent are the necessities of progress.”
“bro bro bro bro hi bro”
“Why was internet born? Porn, porn, porn.”
“Take your woman to the seventh sky”
“Affordable boner for everyone”
“hugging… and that the blood was spurting through his fingers”
Some have several complete sentences that have no relation to one another, and I have fun imagining stories about them.
Every now and then, for the same reason you sniff milk that you know is expired.
I’ve also done it while prepping for running a D&D game or something similar because it’s a good source of proper nouns. Or at least, it was. I just now looked and I guess these days there’s an awful lot more spoofing of companies than attempts at making it look like fake friends.
I only ever check it if someone has been bugging me about an email I haven’t gotten. But this hasn’t happened in years, maybe a decade.
I am also one of those who never checks voice mail. I didn’t want to talk on the phone to you, so why would i talk on the phone to find out who I didn’t want to talk to?
I check my spam folder if and only if there’s a specific e-mail that I’m expecting to receive but haven’t. If you check it every time before emptying it, what’s the point of having a spam folder to begin with? The whole reason I have it is because I don’t want to look at spam. But Gmail is very good about filtering spam, so I haven’t actually found any misfiled e-mails (in either direction) since I’ve started using it.
And I very seldom check my voicemail, because dealing with a voicemail usually entails calling the person back anyway, and so I can just ask them why they called when I do that. The only time I check it is if I can’t get back to the other person (i.e., I hit their voice mail).