What’s the point of reporting spam?

Does marking something as ‘Junk’ in Mail actually do anything? It gives me more work to do clearing out the Junk mailbox. I was hoping that the Mail elves would be responding to ensure unwanted rubbish doesn’t darken my inbox again. Does it really make any difference or should I just trash junk? Andrew Pritchard Mail refines its junk mail filters only if it is in training mode (when ‘Mark as junk mail, but leave it in my Inbox’ is selected under Junk Mail in its preferences). Marking emails as junk (or mistakenly interpreted mails as not junk) affects Mail’s algorithm. In this mode you’re responsible for deleting or moving spam yourself. After a couple of weeks, your filter should be pretty accurate, and you can set the filter to ‘Move it to the Junk mailbox’.

Mail on iOS has no training mode, but marking junk might still be useful because it moves things to the junk folder, where messages are auto-deleted after 30 days (at least for iCloud accounts), so there’s time to change your mind.

Years ago, trainability was a killer feature, but iCloud, Gmail and many ISPs apply very good filtering before messages reach your inbox. Although not tuned to you, these server-side filters are constantly updated, in part by spam reports from thousands of people like you. To flag a message in Gmail, select it and press the ‘Report spam’ button. For iCloud, forward the message as an attachment to spam@icloud.com.