Spam Email FAQ

Almost everyone deals with spam email at some point, and it's easy to feel unsure about what actually counts as spam or how best to handle it. This article answers common questions about spam so you can manage your inbox with confidence and know which steps genuinely help.

What Counts as Spam?

Spam, or junk mail, is unwanted email sent in bulk. Not all unsolicited email is spam, though — legitimate companies send marketing email in bulk to promote their services. What sets marketing email apart from spam is the ability to unsubscribe: marketing email includes an unsubscribe link and shouldn't be marked as spam.

Spammers typically get email addresses in one of two ways: by using automated tools that scan the internet for publicly visible addresses, or by obtaining addresses from compromised or leaked mailing lists and account databases. Email from these sources won't include an unsubscribe link, and should be marked as spam.

What Happens When You Mark an Email as Spam

Marking an email as spam reports details about it — the sender, headers, and content — to the email server. The spam filter uses this information to recognize and filter out similar emails in the future.

Note: Marking an email as spam won't help much if it's a legitimate marketing email from a trusted sender — using the unsubscribe link is more effective. Marking an email as not spam also helps train the filter to recognize which senders are safe.

To mark an email as spam in Hover webmail:

1. Mark the email as Spam.
2. Select Accept to confirm and share the email's data with Hover's spam-filtering partner.

Tip: Once you select Accept, you won't see this prompt again. If you decline instead, the prompt reappears each time you mark an email as spam.

What's the Best Way to Block Spam?

Marking an email as spam is the most effective way to reduce spam long-term, because it reports the message's contents to the spam filter. Spammers often send from multiple spoofed addresses, so blocking a single sender rarely helps for long.

The blocked senders list is better suited to stopping contact from a specific individual than to reducing spam overall, since it doesn't report content to the spam filter. For marketing email you no longer want, use the unsubscribe link in the message instead of blocking the sender.

Can I Prevent My Emails From Being Marked as Spam?

There's no way to guarantee how a recipient's email provider will treat your message. Sending to people who don't recognize your address can increase the chance of your email being marked as spam, which can affect your sending reputation over time and lead to more of your messages being flagged.

If you send email from your own domain, adding an SPF record helps prevent spoofing and strengthens your domain's sending reputation.

Next steps

• Set up SPF for your domain if you haven't already — see Creating an SPF Record.
• Learn to spot phishing attempts — see Identifying Fraudulent Emails.
• Seeing spoofed mail or a wave of bounce notices? See Email Spoofing and Undeliverable Notices.

Questions? Contact Hover Support.