From a thread started in March, there was this post from an Etsy Moderator on April 11th:
"Thank you for reporting this! We’re dedicated to keeping your accounts and the Etsy marketplace safe and secure.
We’ve been making improvements to help you better identify authentic messages from Etsy. Recently, we’ve worked to reduce the noise in your Inbox by automatically moving potentially suspicious messages to your Spam folder (which you can only check on desktop right now).
As a result of this, some of your messages may have been moved to the Spam folder in error. We’re working to improve the accuracy of these measures and we apologize for the confusion and inconvenience this may have caused.
We’ve also heard your questions and concerns about how this might impact your Star Seller eligibility, which we wanted to clarify. Messages marked as spam by Etsy will not impact your Star Seller eligibility. If Etsy has marked a message as spam that you subsequently move out of the folder, we’ve ensured that also will not impact your Star Seller eligibility.
You can learn more about how to stay protected from potential scams and suspicious messages here."
Despite Etsy's efforts there were a decent number of shops reporting that messages they moved out of spam & replied to did end up affecting their messaging stats. Etsy did apparently make some manual corrections to the stats for shop owners.
In the various threads on the topic some shops were able to correct their stats by placing the buyer's message & their response back into the spam box.
Other mentioned they simply replied to the message but let it sit in the spam box.
I honestly don't know how that works since if I place a message in spam I see a notice about blocking the sender. So keeping a message in the spam box might not allow a real buyer to send another message, reply to your message?
Now thankfully your thread is the first I've seen in a while about messages being automatically sent to spam. Like PrairieCrocusStudio said, maybe more and more shop owners have taken to checking their spam box regularly?
But then again I've been wondering about the messaging system for over a week now. A message I sent as a buyer has a box on the right side that shows the user name & shop name I sent the message to with the notation that "This buyer hasn't messaged you before". As the sender (buyer) why would I need to know this?
The shop I sent this message to hasn't replied - but - tbh I can't really get upset with the shop owner if they aren't aware their messages might be going to spam.
And, out of curiosity I just went to that message I sent & I was able to send it to my spam box. I got the blue banner telling me that the sender was now blocked from sending me additional messages. LOL, I guess I just blocked myself from sending messages to me??
