If a statistically valid sample of an ISP's users (as processed by
their own user reputation systems) think something is spam, why
would that ISP disagree?
Ummm...maybe because they know most end users don't know the
difference between spam and other forms of unwanted mail?
Why should that matter?
Because spam reports and unwanted-mail reports are very different
things and call for different reactions. If I as a mailing list admin
get something saying just "this user doesn't want this mail any
longer", a quick unsub is a perfectly reasonable reaction. If I get
something saying "this mail is spam", a much deeper investigation is
warranted - unless I think it really means the former and is just using
the wrong term, of course.
Conflating the two - which is what reporting unwanted mail as spam, or
spam as vanilla unwanted mail, does - is bad because it means impairing
the response to at least one of the underlying situations.
It's unwanted, and it got reported, and it's up to the ISP to decide
what to do about that.
Yes, but it got mis-reported, reported as something it's not. This
will, at best, waste resources.
One of the things I've noticed is that far too many people - on any
side - seem to lose track of the fact that mail can be non-spam and
still be eminently blockworthy.
Maybe because they don't care if there's a difference between spam
and other forms of unwanted mail?
Then - unless within a fairly specific and narrow context - they're
stupid, because "spam" and "unwanted mail" are categories with subset
relations in neither direction, and the appropriate responses to the
four cateogries are all fairly distinct. (Yes, spam can be wanted;
stealth spamtraps are the first example to come to mind.)
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