I know I could post this on a computer newsgroup but I thought I would start here first. I bet there’s as much know-how here as there is on any computer forum.
I have windows xp, and use Incredimail. Over the last couple of weeks some emails have gone astray. Two people didn’t get rather important emails related to the setting up of meetings with them, and even worse, I didn’t get the email from Roger telling me how much my new unicycle would be and when I would get it!
Any ideas why this is happening and what I can do about it?
Contact your ISP and figure out what the spam controls are. Ask them to do spam filtering right by rejecting the receipt of spam instead of silently discarding it. Then the actual sender will be notified. Rejecting is different than bouncing.
Here’s a place where the Subject Line Police can do more than just being annoying! Make sure you use detailed, specific subject lines if you’re worried about messages being dumped by spam filters. A good subject should be about as long as a short sentence (not one or two words) and be specific about what’s in there. I have to learn a way to filter my own Spam service’s reports, so I can search for specific things (like occurances of “uni”) or filter out specific things (like “mortgage,” “cialis,” “paypal,” etc.) when I go through my daily list of 200-300 spams. I use OnlyMyEmail.com.
My Gmail spam filter rarely lets me down, though on a couple instances I have missed emails that should have made it to my inbox.
I don’t usually bother going through the spam either so I never really do see missed messages. I just let them collect and delete themselves after 30 days. Currently in the last 30 days, I have received 968 spam messages. I couldn’t imagine 200-300 a day!
Spam, I read, covers at least half of all emails sent. As such it presents the net with quite a heavy load. To return Spam to its owner has both beneficial and detrimental effects. Firstly you know that your mail has been bounced. Secondly, the spammer gets his own mail box spammed ( but will he care?).
On the negative side it significantly increases net traffic again. ISPs may not wish to do this, and may refuse to set up such controls.
Avoid sexual, drug, financial etc etc words in the title. Try not to send a single mail to a long list of people. Make your title relevant, and likely to be read by the recipient. This will help the mail to get through. Check your ISP to discover what sort of filters he uses to identify spam. That way you can grease your own email’s way through the system.
Also some mail systems…eg hotmail, also have spam folders for each individual user. The user needs to check his spam folder. Many don’t and the mail languishes there until deleted.
The problems with bouncing. It actually does not fill up the spammers inbox as most spam is forged using someone else’s email address. Bouncing is accepting a piece of email, telling the sending server that it was successfully received, and then if found to be spam is sends out an error message to the return address.
Rejecting is where the incoming server gets the email and checks it before sending a success response to the sending server. If the message is spam, the incoming server would simply say that it’s not accepting that mail and give a reason. Then it’s the job of the sending server to give the error message to sender. For legitimate messages, an email would be sent to the sender by their ISP, or a message will be instantly given to the user. For spam, the sending server will ignore that it failed and continue on to send out more email. Rejecting creates no extra traffic, and notifies the sender if a legitimate email did not go through.