One of the 7 billion mailing lists I’m on at work is one that’s set up with AOL’s Feedback Loop. When an AOL user receives e-mail from our domain and marks it as spam, we receive a notification that the particular message has been flagged as spam.

I was talking about this with some coworkers today. We don’t send spam. (And we use SPF and DKIM, so well-configured mailservers will reject spam that forges our domain.) We’re a social networking site. People manually opt into receiving notifications of certain events on the site. And when they get those e-mails, it flags them as spam.

This is a giant frustration, and for multiple reasons. For one, it means that I receive hundreds of messages a day. I think I’m going to start going through and unsubscribing (from e-mail) the people who flag our e-mails as spam, since they clearly don’t want them. But the bigger hassle is that it means that hundreds of people every day are unknowingly working to make AOL’s mailservers think we’re spammers.

So I mentioned that we should work on disabling e-mail notifications for these people, and the reply was that this isn’t necessarily so. Apparently, it’s very common practice for people to hit “Spam” to get rid of a message, instead of deleting it. Reading up on it a bit, it seems that this is a pretty common problem, though it’s hard to tell whether it’s isolated to AOL users, or if it’s just more obvious because they’re the only one that actually gives you those stats.