Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Emails - blacklisting -spam

I've been having this problem for a few months now. I've 'raised a ticket' with my email service provider, but they shrug their shoulders and claim to know nothing about it.

Legitimate emails coming IN to me, from people whom I've already emailed and are therefore on my whitelist, are routinely trapped as "spam". This means that every single day I have to go to the email service provider's Webmail, and check the Spam folder, find these emails, mark them again as whitelisted, and manually shunt their emails to my In box, where I can read them. They arrive there, marked as ***SPAM***.

I do not even begin to understand what's happening here, can anyone help?

If it helps, the Webmail's interface is "horde". Thanks for any helpful replies!

Since these messages are appearing in the SPAM folder on your provider's webmail interface that eliminates anything untoward happening on your Mac (which would probably be easier to solve). The typical email message goes through a number of servers between the sender and recipient and a given message may be marked as SPAM at any of those locations for any number of different reasons. The reasons include, but are not limited to, such things as:

• the domain (the part that comes after @ in the sender's address) is a known or suspected source of spam
• the sender sends a LOT of emails (this is enough to make them suspect which is why organizations with large volumes of traffic use bulk email sending services.
• the individual message has a very large number of addressees and or BCCs
• the messages are being routed through suspect IP addresses
• the message(s) contain suspicious content for example the content is entirely graphic or contains links to suspect sites
• your email provider subscribes to a list of suspect services that is perhaps overly cautious
• your email provider has their standards set to a stringent threshold
• and on and on and...

The question is not why the messages are tagged as SPAM or whether that is happening enroute or at your email provider's POP/IMAP server. Rather it is why isn't your email provider honoring your whitelist? In the final analysis that is a question that only your email provider can answer. If they can't or won't answer the only remaining alternative is changing providers and email addresses 🤬

The reasons given above are very good, but it also seems that there are variations in those reasons that vary from day to day. Very frustrating.

I had an experience where a legitimate e-mail from my ISP to me got sent to the ISP's own spam folder. Go figure.

I’ve had a similar experience with a previous ISP (quite a large problem) and with my current ISP (considerable fewer occasions). The first time around I spent a bit of time trying to get it sorted out only to learn:

• they, like other ISPs, don’t do the filtering
• they subscribe to a filtering service who set the standards
• individual ISPs have no control over the stringency of the filtering

The upside for the ISP was that they didn’t have to spend money and time staying current on everything involved with SPAM and the latest Spammer tricks. The downside was that they didn’t have any ability to make adjustments to the filtering.

It could be that your ISP subscribes to such a service.

FYI, In my case, it got quite silly with things like Airline tickets going to the Junk folder. I even had Ira’s experience, where a piece of mail from the ISP was marked as Junk.


That is a real pain in the patoot but, it seems to me, the ISP should be able to make that quite a bit simpler. They are receiving the Spam (confirmed by the fact that it’s on their Webmail site), so why don’t they let it proceed to you, even marked as Spam? It can show up in your Junk folder, on your machine, where you can remark it without a trip to the Webmail site.

I use Apple Mail and my ISP's Spam Folder shows up as a Junk Folder in Mail, so I do not have to go to the Webmail site to check. I also use SpamSieve and that creates a separate Spam Folder for e-mails that it catches.

Virtually all email providers (with the exception of Google) subscribe to one or more such services and use some sort of an aggregate score to rate a given domain or even a given message as SPAM. The choice of rating services and the weight placed on each as well as the aggregate score value cut-off are determined by the the email provider. This has become an issue this year due to the EU's setting higher standards and uncertainty on the part of the providers in how to meet those standards. It is still being sorted out world wide.

…and THAT is the point.

From Bensheim's description it sounds as if the account is being accessed on the Mac as a POP account. If it were accessed as IMAP then all of the account folders would normally be expected to appear on the Mac (or iOS device) including the spam folder. These days most accounts can be accessed as either POP or IMAP and switching to IMAP would offer at the very least the opportunity to access the spam folder without having to log onto the webmail site and with luck would allow Mail's spam filter, whitelist, and rules to be the ruling decision maker. Although I vaguely recall a previous thread where there was an overriding consideration that was dictating the use of POP that may still exist.

I also use Apple Mail and that is exactly my experience. My account is IMAP.

Thanks Joe and everyone else who has replied. I really do not want my email provider to shunt all spam to me: my husband's account routinely gets 20 - 50 spams per day. These are real spams since he hardly ever uses email these days. (The accounts are linked so that I get all his emails; a hangover from the days we ran our own business.)

I don't know what to do about this but it's eased off. I'm sure it will surge again after Easter. One good thing, a bit of serendipity, is that I finally found out after YEARS of being told it was not possible, how to view the Webmail in Firefox my default browser. They kept saying it only worked on Safari, and I only used Safari for that purpose.

Another bit of serendipity, and I really hope no one marks this as "off topic", is that the number of spam phone calls* (used to be easily five a DAY) has gone down to zero. Hooray! I assume the Asian call centre "workers" can't get into the office nowadays.

*long distance call, Asian voice claiming to have English name, saying my router is infected / I owe tax to the Government / a mysterious £600 transaction on my debit card / and other variants thereof.

Off-the-wall question: Can the same email address be BOTH a POP and IMAP account in Mail.app, in other words, two accounts for the same address?

Reason: During the five minutes that I"ve had an IMAP account I couldn't find a way to remove email from my server, so I'm wondering if I can use the POP "Get Account Info" option to do it and maintain the IMAP account too, so I can get that spam folder.

Thanks.

Answering my own question: I tried, and

• Yes, the two accounts can co-exist.
• No, under those circumstances I still don't seem to be able to delete mail from my server.
• My AOL spam folder did NOT appear in Mail's sidebar.

Deleted the account.

Oh, well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Account Information, there is an option to "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message". I only have a POP account so I don't know if this option appears for an IMAP account. Does this work for you?

Thanks, Jon, but that option doesn't work for me, because I often use my server for dead-storage of mail that I want to keep, but not on my MBP.

The POP option I use is to control-click on "Inbox" and select "Get Account Info," which shows all email on my server and allows me to delete selectively. It doesn't work the same way with an IMAP account, though, showing only the folders on my server, not their contents.

And, anyhow, what I really wanted was to get the server-side spam folder on my MBP to avoid having to check AOL periodically, but that didn't happen, which is a deal-breaker.

That is a POP account only feature included as a "workaround" when using multiple devices to access the same POP account. (The first device to access the account gets the message and deletes it from the server so it is unavailable to any other device accessing the same account.)


You may think this is a bit off topic, but when you mentioned this I had to wonder if you had looked at any database solutions for storing and organizing your "dead-storage" of mail that you want to keep. That might open other ways of solving the problem. I use DEVONThink 3 and it provides a wide variety of options for organizing and accessing all sorts of data data including Email and there is a built in "server" function that can run and host the files on your server, but make them accessible to your laptop.

Evernote, and Mail Archiver X Easy also come to mind.

I appreciate the suggestion, but it's unnecessary.

The number of items I'm talking about is rarely more than a handful, and their storage period is rarely more than a month or so. I just like to keep my Mail interface as uncluttered as possible.