The lowly Gmail Spam folder. It appears to collect nothing but garbage and is routinely ignored. It does however, have a function.  It’s purpose is to keep spam and malicious emails out of your inbox while still allowing you to review them. These suspicious emails  aren’t automatically deleted as Google recognizes it isn’t perfect and may wrongly identify an email as spam or malicious.

How should you manage your Spam folder? For the most part, it can be ignored.  If you find that you are missing an email, you can go looking for it. However, I don’t recommend checking your Spam folder daily. If you are worried about missing emails, then a weekly check should be sufficient.

If you find an email in your Spam folder that you don’t think should be there, don’t move it immediately to your inbox. Open it first and check the banner at the beginning of the message. Google lets you know why the message was put there. If it is because it was marked Spam previously, then it is safe to move to your inbox. If however, it indicates that it contains a malicious link or attachment then leave the email where you found it as Google doesn’t make mistakes identifying malicious emails.

Fortunately, malicious emails found in your Spam folder don’t need to be reported to the IT Security Team. Google is already filtering them from inboxes so we don’t need to alert your colleagues. This saves us from replying to 57.3 million emails.   You can simply delete them and get on with your day. Even better, let Google delete them for you. Messages in Spam that are 30 days old are automatically deleted.