The Ignore Button

The biggest return on AI/LLM tools seems to be spam generation and so called conversion. Bumping people's inboxes with machine-generated content costs nothing and provides small positive returns - someone clicks the link or responds to the marketing message. Zero cost and positive (no matter how small) revenue means one  thing: repeat at scale. So we are flooded with spam. 

Automated filters have been losing the battle. That, combined with the simple lack of discipline to clean the inbox on regular basis, often leads to the complete loss of communication capabilities. I am an Inbox-Zero type. Never allowing my inbox to be longer than one page and often keeping the number of unprocessed messages below 5 and zero unread. But that pattern is quite rare today, at least judging by what I often see looking over people's shoulders.

One idea that might actually improve the situation is an <Ignore> button. Today we have <Delete> or <Move to Trash> but they really don't tell the email app that I'm not interested ion the message. Delete may just mean "I've read it, don't need a copy to be stored.". It is neutral in a sense that it does not clearly communicate that I don't want to see this message (and similar messages in future). Perhaps an even more radical option to "Ignore all messages older than xxx days." would also work? After all people who cannot manage their inboxes do just that. Maybe even letting the senders know "the recipient explicitly ignored your message" would tell them something?

Maybe. Or perhaps we should be using "Report spam" more aggressively?

Email remains to be a broken protocol. Senders are not penalized for sending irrelevant messages. They should be. I remember some 25 years ago Microsoft was proposing for the email receiving servers to require the senders to do some extra work, so that mass mailing would be costly while sending a single message would still be (almost) free. The idea did not catch up. And we are where we are - drowning in the self-imposed flood of irrelevant stuff.