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Comment by batman1231049 | Hacker News Reader

Send a few more emails from the same account with obvious scam-attempt material.

E.g. You've been selected as our daily winner. You will be rewarded a brand new Apple Phone 5!! Visit here to claim: <insert fishy URL>

Maybe they'll notice all the others from the same account and mass delete them all without opening the rest.

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This is a brilliantly clever approach. Kudos! Due to the complexity of the spam filtering at google, it would take a good deal of know-how to successfully get the sending address black-listed (and all messages from it sorted as spam), but it does seem possible.

Wow that is a very original idea! Some risk of pissing off the person if they have already read my email asking for a deletion. And they would know my mom's company as it all came from that and complain or something. Worth the risk you think?

I'd try being polite first. Though spamming the account might work for getting everything sorted as spam, it does not delete the problem message and it will anger the account owner. If someone made a simple mistake of sending you something, and then bombed your account, you'd be rightfully angry.

If you want help trying to track down the owner of the account, contact me privately (email in my profile).

Is there a risk that this would increase the account's "spam score" with Google, and future emails might get unnecessarily flagged? I have no clue how they determine what's spam, just something to think about.

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