Like most people I get a lot of spam and junk mail and a lot of it gets trapped by filters on the mail server and in my mail client. Just recently I have been getting a lot more ‘real’ emails than normal, relating to the elections. What is surprising is how many of these emails are getting caught in the filters and turning up in the junk mail folder.I can’t really see a pattern to it. Some of the emails are ones generated by campaign sites which contain several hyperlinks which might be why some are getting trapped. Some contain large numbers – referring to budget numbers or the £97bn cost of Trident replacement – and maybe that is getting interpreted as a bad sign: most emails that mention large sums of money are from fake Nigerian generals after all.
So I now have to make sure I am a lot more careful when clearing out the junk mail folder in case there are some false positives in there. Anything that is getting trapped at the server is really beyond reach and will no doubt look like me ignoring mail from potential voters.
What is bugging me is how I can get several identical emails, all generated by the same online campaign and so all having the same content, and some of them go to the junk mail folder and some go into my inbox. It can only be that there is something suspicious about the senders’ email addresses.
I have a similar problem with FoE emails – since the volume isn’t actually as high as yours I tend to clear my spam folder out each week or so to keep an eye on stuff. I can have some emails from one person go into my inbox and then just one into spam. I thought that Yahoo was just messing with my head.
If it is an address you expect to get regular mails from you can add them to a whitelist can’t you?
That works OK for me – but not when I am getting loads of one-off mails from lots of different people.
It is often from people on my contacts list so I’m just generally baffled. Although that is a fairly normal state for me.