What's the difference between trash and junk folders?
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Notenboom here for askleo.com.
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The question. "When an email is moved
to junk versus trash, what is the difference to the end user?
What is the final outcome to the email and what makes more sense to the user?"
Junk and trash are very similar.
They're used to dispose of email that you don't want.
The difference is in some ways quite subtle.
It's all about what happens next.
So to be clear, junk and spam are two different terms for the same thing.
Outlook.com for example, uses junk as the term.
So you've got a junk folder.
You .Ark things as junk.
Other email programs use the term spam.
You have a spam folder, you mark things as spam.
They're the same thing.
A trash folder is probably more closely related to what you might recognize as
a recycle bin or a recycle folder on Windows File Explorer.
In other words, something you put into the trash can still be recovered for a while.
You can bring it back to wherever you deleted it.
From now, it's important to realize that,
unlike the recycle bin in Windows File Explorer,
the trash folder in most email programs has a definite lifespan.
In other words, on most websites, things are removed from trash after
a certain amount of time, automatically, usually 30 days.
But it can be different.
Or if you're using a trash folder in your
email program like Outlook or something like that, you may have a configured
to automatically empty trash whenever you exit the program.
The bottom line, though,
is that when you delete a message, it gets moved to trash so that until it's
been emptied until the trash folder has been emptied, you can still get it back.
Spam is, of course, spam.
What it means is that your email program is looking at your email as it arrives
and trying to determine if it is, in fact legitimate email or spam.
So it automatically moves things
to the spam folder if it determines that something is in fact spam.
Now that's different from trash in the sense that it happens automatically.
Things you delete go into trash,
but spam can automatically arrive in your spam folder.
Now, there's one other thing that makes the spam folder unique.
Typically, if you explicitly mark something as spam,
or move something from your inbox to your spam folder or the reverse.
If in your spam folder, you mark something as not spam,
or you move something from the spam folder back to your inbox, then the email program
or interface uses that movement to inform or improve its spam filter.
So when you mark something as spam, you're telling the spam filter things
that look like this are spam to me, do a better job of recognizing them.
Conversely, if you mark something as not spam that's in your spam folder,
then the filter is told you know what things that look like this.
They're not spam. This one is legit.
Throw it in my inbox and try not to Mark those as spam in the future.
Depending on your filter, it may do a better job in the future.
It may do a better job quickly.
It may do a better job over a much longer period of time.
In other words, you need to do those movements more
frequently for a while until the spam filter learns.
And in some cases, spam filters appear not
to learn even though you tell them over and over again.
But the bottom line is that the act of moving something in and out of your
spam folder adapts or instructs or educates the spam
filter in some way that's unlike the trash folder, trash is just trash.
You move something in, you take something out, it's all on you.
But the spam folder putting things in spam
and taking things out of spam is intended to make the spam filter better.
Now, the spam folder works in many ways,
like the trash folder in that spam is only kept for so long.
Same rules apply.
It's going to be kept for some amount
of time, and after that amount of time, it's going to be permanently deleted.
Some email interfaces actually take it a step further.
They will say after a certain amount of time, the spam messages are moved
to the trash folder, and then after a certain amount of time.
After that, they get deleted.
In other cases, they're just permanently
deleted as soon as the time has elapsed in the spam folder.
Same thing for desktop email programs,
you may have your trash automatically deleted as you exit.
You may have your spam folder
automatically emptied as you exit as well, but that's the big difference.
Ultimately, they're all about getting rid of messages that you don't want to see.
Using the spam folder presumably helps you
train the spam filter to do better job a more accurate job in the future.
Hope that's helpful for updates.
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I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is Askleo.com.