Missing Email Nightmare

In the last few weeks, there have been several new forms of email SPAM including ones with HTML graphics, a very scary situation. In the hopes that others don’t have similar problems to what I just learned, I wanted to share some insight and what changes we made today:

• What happened yesterday? Almost 10 emails bounced and several folks emailed saying they had to resend emails to me … scary when one is your bookkeeper.
• Talked to my bookkeeper today and learned she’s sent me a report several times over the last few weeks … and I still didn’t have the reports?
• After an extended conversation with Michael at HostMySite, about more technical solutions than I care to recall, here is what I learned and what I changed.

You might have MORE THAN ONE “Junk Email” folder

Where is Your Email?

• Given the huge & growing SPAM problems, your email host (delivers email to your computer) is likely filtering out quite a bit of SPAM … and holding it on their server, i.e. the missing junk email folder I never knew about until today.
• When I can’t find a “missing email” I have only been searching Outlook’s “junk email” folder and of course, I wasn’t finding most of the missing emails
• We turned off ALL filtering of SPAM at HostMySite, i.e. they were keeping all “SPAM-High” emails on their server. Everyone uses a different algorithm to try and determine probability of SPAM and just like SEO algorithms, they’ll keep changing.
• Here’s what I hope will now happen”
  • All emails will get forwarded to my laptop and Outlook and hopefully most of the extra mails will go to Outlook’s “junk email” folder, as follows:
    • Host-My-Site – will run algorithms and flag emails in subject line as HIGH (21/higher), MED (10-20), LOW (5-9) or not flagged as SPAM (1-4)
    • SPAM-High – previously never saw these, and I just go one from the president of Mr Handyman so I know I’ve been losing lots of important emails.
    • SPAM-Med and SPAM-Low will mostly be dumped into Outlook’s junk mail foder like they’ve always been

I think it’s working. I’ve already gotten one SPAM-HIGH email in my inbox, from the president of Mr Handyman! Now I know I’ve been loosing lots of important email, and you might be too!

PS I just reviewed the 15 missing emails from my bookkeeper (only save 30 days on the server, and she was on vacation for 10 of those days) hoping to find a clue as to why so many are being flagged SPAM-HIGH. Only 2 had attachments, and none appear to have many links. HostMySite said that Yahoo is somehow flagging the emails indicating that they didn’t originate from a trusted source, so my bookkeeper has to go back to her technical support.