Louise,
My basic contention is that if users are educated about the availability of a mark/unmark as spam feature and whitelisting in general terms, and what those are about, that would be sufficient. ?It is well-nigh impossible to do this in a way that is tutorial as there are myriad e-mail client programs and web interfaces to e-mail, and the vast majority support these functions, but the mechanics used vary widely.
I don't believe that one can do a "generic tutorial" on these features because the mechanics used vary widely. ?However, alerting users that they need to know about these, describe their purposes, and tell them to have a look at the help for their e-mail interface or to do a web search regarding how their e-mail interface performs these functions is enough.
We're never going to get anything near to 100% of users attending to this, but right now it appears that the effort is seldom, if ever, being made to let people know about these functions and why using them is important not only for them, personally, but in assisting spam filtering to be improved by their e-mail providers through collection of information about what has been reclassified by the user and why a user should not ever classify anything as spam that's not really spam. ?There is nothing that ever comes from an e-mail list, to which one must subscribe before ever getting a single message, that should ever be marked by the user as spam. ?In the case of groups.io in particular they should use the "Mute this Topic" feature to stop specific topics that don't interest them or, if they've lost all interest, they should unsubscribe from a group (and this applies to any mailing list service, not just Groups.io). ?Marking messages from mailing lists as spam is a part of a process that can, in the end, have mailing list materials being incorrectly classified by e-mail providers via feedback mechanisms, and that is not desirable.?
Brian
