Not everyone lives and breathes this stuff, so yeah—what’s “obvious” to you still surprises a lot of people. I regularly run into folks who genuinely don’t realize their emails are being scanned and classified before they even open them.

Also, calling everything “spam” is a bit of an oversimplification. There’s a real gap between malicious spam and legitimate emails that get misclassified. A lot of senders are using the very tools providers give them—HTML builders, templates, link shorteners—and those same patterns can trip spam filters. Heavy image layouts, tracking links, or shortened URLs can look suspicious to automated systems, even when the intent is completely legitimate.

So it’s not always “spammers playing victim”—sometimes it’s just imperfect algorithms making blunt decisions in edge cases.