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I have currently two messages in my inbox that passed the spam filter. The interesting thing is that there are not like the regular ones that you would see in the Spam folder.

Subject: [My Home Address]

Hey [My Name]

I guess your job is going well. I just wanted to tell you about a superb job opportunity in New York. Philippe we have had many of our clients take this opp & I have heard some fantastic stories.

The newspaper has story featuring one of our clients, Kelly Richards. It will also give you all the relevant information you need to get started. [My Name] the link is [Digg link that links to a "get money from home" site] and I believe the story will be featured on the homepage until tomorrow.

Best regards Sandra Heavlin

It looks like I may have signed up at one point to something that did not offer Canadian residences and used a silly New York postal code instead. Though this is the first time I am seeing spam in this format.

And the second one

Subject: RE:[My Home Address]

[My Name] Day before today I spotted they are handing over out their grant green notes in New York

The heavyweight reason why this is they are needing to seriously cure economy

Simply search "[search query]" in Google to take a look at how to secure it for your family.

Respectfully yours Gary Edelman

The first result in the query is again a fake site.

I want to just report these conversations as spam, but I am not sure how they will affect the rest of my messages with my address in the subject line. Ideally I would like to trace this back to source and remove my information from there, but most likely this is not possible.

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Think of it this way: if you by accident let one of your cards fell down in a mass marketing company while you were passing through there to get from point A to B in your walking, would you think that going there and asking for your card back would make any difference? Yes, best thing to do from that point forth is ignoring them. – Cawas Jun 14 '11 at 14:35

1 Answer

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Reporting as spam emails with "good" keywords (the kind that looks like it is actually written by a human being) is difficult because of the concern you are obviously voicing. However, most spam intelligence will not only look at the message itself, but other components like who sent it, where it came from, and who it was sent to.

  • By reporting as spam you are providing the community a service in that you are reinforcing the identification of those other components as spam-ly behavior
  • You can attempt to remove your name from wherever it came from, but in all likelihood that is like feeding trolls.
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Now, I'd love to know exactly how the "report spam" is handled in google, or at least in general terms what's the path a message will follow after it's been reported. – Cawas Jun 14 '11 at 14:36

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