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Drop a non-relevant email into a recipient's bin, and risk being shut out of inboxes throughout an email domain.

Wham, Bam, Spam Button Slams Email Marketing

Legitimate email marketers risk ruining deliverability and effectiveness of their campaign, if they get careless or greedy with the power of email.

The Dot Email marketing community site said the ease of hitting a spam button to mark an unwanted message jeopardizes future campaigns.

"I believe that a lot of people still don't grasp the power of the ‘This is SPAM’ button within the web based mail clients and how it can greatly effect clients list attrition as well as deliverability for future campaigns," said Michael Weisel, CTO of Gold Lasso, Dot Email's sponsor.

"The bottom line with all of this is that if you send relevant information, to people who want it, in the proper format, this will greatly limit your risk of destroying your lists or encouraging users to press that oh so powerful (and sometimes too easy to click) SPAM button," he said.

AOL has been the most unfriendly to unwanted email, with 38.4 percent of marketers surveyed saying it had the lowest deliverability. Google's Gmail scored very favorably, with only 7.1 percent having issues with deliverable email.

MSN/Hotmail tends to vanish emails marked as spam, meaning the message doesn't bounce or fall into someone's spam folder. Microsoft's products vexed 21.4 percent of marketers. EarthLink and Yahoo did so at rates of 17 and 16.1 percent, respectively.