Stop My E-mail From Going Into Others Junk Mial Folder

There isn't anything you can do about the way that other people have e-mail spam filters set, or how thier ISP's handle it if they have the option.

For example with Comcast I have the option of either having messages that get marked as spam by them go into a folder that I'd need to empty, or I can have them auto-deleted. I choose to have them auto-deleted. I never see them.

I do know that messages that contain a signature line get auto sent to spam folder on Yahoo accounts. There is nothing you can do about the way Yahoo handles it.

gayla wrote: This problem seems especially troublesome in mail going to a Hotmail or a Yahoo address. I have an online business & many of my customers never see the e-mails sent to them.

This is annoying, we get the same problem with e-mail from the forum (the one everyone gets when they sign up). There's nothing any of us can do about it, although you can setup test Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to make sure e-mails sent to them are not deleted. If a test e-mail doesn't get through to your account tweak it until it does.

I work for an ISP and I hear complaints from both sides, people who get filtered by our mail filters and our emails getting filtered by other users and the sad thing is that nothing can be done but turning off the spam filters.

*** warning rant ahead ***

Email has been ruined by the spammers - if it weren't for them we wouldn't have all these safe guards in place filtering out the stuff we want.

Rule based filters don't work as either the rules are too general or the spammers work out how to get round them (Take the recent spate of embedded image based spam for an example).

Blacklists don't work because the spammers use zombie machines or exploited scripts and constantly alter their IP's and email addresses

Challenge/response doesn't work because the confirmation emails get filtered by spam protection or people don't know what to do with them.

SPF/greylisting doesn't work because they have to be implemented properly by all providers to be effective.

Because of spam email servers are now processing millions of times more emails than in sensible and that's slowing down email delivery times (remember when email was ALWAYS instant?). Spammers have destroyed a useful service to make a few bucks and I hate them for it. Personally, I think if ISP's started actively monitoring their users email sending habits and blacklisted anyone who started pumping out junk we would all be better off but ALL ISP's have to do it for it to work.

We should all just face it - email is on it's deathbed - it's going to take a global effort to save it.

*** end of rant ***

If you want to check specific messages, there are some web sites that will check your emails and see how likely they are to be flagged as spam. Here's a couple:

• http://www.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/
• http://www.emailcash.com/spamcheck.html

Just wanted to say: excellent rant Andy!

Although I don't think e-mail is on its death bed, bayesian filtering is still working well for me (I've used Opera and Mozilla Thunderbird effectively for this), my mail client seems to have effectively learnt that an e-mail containing only an image should be junked.

Thanks for the links Tim, I'll be using those in future.