Junk Mail & Blackmail

Every mail service worth its salt now has a junk mail filter. Yahoo, Outlook, Google Mail etc ... I sometimes wonder what sort of criteria these mail services use to filter email and tag some of them as being "junk".

I have been puzzling over this for quite some time and I dont understand how it works ... There is an email I get from some vague company called "Palisade Risk". Every two days I get a marketing message from them on my yahoo account, which I mark as spam. However, although I have tagged it as spam more than 20 times, the email is never delivered to my spam folder.

I must give yahoo credit for weeding out most of my junk mail though. I am curious though on whether these two situations (hypothetical) could ever occur.

1. Legitimate companies, sending out necessary and important emails are approached by mail services and asked to pay a service fee, in lieu of which their emails would automatically be classified as spam

2. Spammers paying mail services a price in order for their messages to be delivered to the Inbox rather than the Spam folder.

Unlikely to hapen maybe, but I love conspiracy theories :-)