Gmail – way to reject unwanted messages in Gmail

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Somebody mentioned to me a long time ago that this is a feature in Outlook, but I never needed it so I'm not even sure what it's called.

I've been getting more and more mis-directed email lately, particularly from credit card companies and other corporations. It isn't spam: other people have mistakenly signed up for these services with my email address. For example, every month I get a statement notice and payment confirmation from AmEx for a guy who shares my last name and first initial.

Is there any way to reject emails like this? They aren't spam, per se, so I'm reluctant to mark them as such and wind up having legit email flagged because of it. I've tried letting them know that they have the wrong address for the person, but big companies like this don't make it easy to respond to their emails.

If I can't reject them, what's the best way to deal with this? Filter to delete mail from that sender?

Best Answer

There are currently 3 basic ways to reject unwanted messages in gmail:

  1. Mark as Spam

    Unlike your belief, you can safely mark anything you consider slightly annoying or unrequested as a spam. And you should do it. I've marked mails directly from my primary contacts as spam, and never lost any important mail because of that. Just to illustrate to your specific case, gmail even offers an automatic unsubscribe feature for some lists if you click on Mark as spam. Should the worst happen and you find legitimate messages on the spam folder, there are fixes for that, such as adding their e-mail to your contacts or using filters.

  2. Filter

    If you can come up with a simple enough rule that will work for your sample, you can safely create a filter. If you have any doubts, instead of throwing stuff to trash, set a label and archive the message, so you can review the filter later on. Simple stuff.

  3. Priority Inbox

    That's even more magical. In my case, it was almost useless because I've been using the first two features and activating it didn't help much. But it's great nevertheless. Just set it up, try it and see if it's a fit. The whole idea behind it is exactly what you've requested: reject unwanted messages that you don't want to send to spam or trash. Maybe it's a mail list you subscribed yourself. You can rank it as unimportant, if gmail didn't already did it, and it will stay on your inbox for further review.

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