Ever wonder what happens to an email when you report it as spam?  It’s actually a really important tool to help your email provider ensure that only appropriate emails are hitting your inbox. When an email is reported as spam it sends the information to your email provider so that they can strengthen their spam filters.  Because of this it's very important to only use this feature when you are sure that the email is indeed spam.  Otherwise, you can cause a legitimate email address to get filtered as spam. When in doubt, just delete the email instead of reporting it as spam.  And if it's a newsletter that you do not wish to receive, you can always simply unsubscribe or request to be removed from their mailing list.

If you do mistakenly report an email as spam, don’t worry, it’s easy to correct. It sends this email to your spam folder, so you can always go there to recover that email and return it to your inbox.  In Gmail you even get a link to undo the action.