How do I stop email from going to spam?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here
for AskLeo.com. As you know, the battle against spam is ongoing and we
face two different kinds of problems with it.
One is spam that you don't want showing
up in your inbox, but the other is email that you do want mistakenly being flagged
as spam and getting shuffled off to your spam or junk folder.
In other words, you never see it in your inbox.
What I'm going to do here is walk through
the steps to basically do the best you can and deal with that using Outlook.com.
I'll also talk about the relationship
of your desktop email program to your email service and so on.
So here we are in Outlook.com. You can see
I've got an empty inbox, I've got no trash.
I just emptied it, and I've got a couple of things in my junk email folder.
Let's go ahead and look at that.
And sure enough, there's actual honest spam in there right now,
literally within the last couple of minutes since I emptied this folder.
But there's this email from this guy called Ask Leo and it says, you know what?
Let's pretend this is spam.
Let's not.
In reality, this is legitimate email that I want to have show up in my inbox.
The most important thing you can do, regardless of what email service you use,
regardless of what email program you use, is to right click on it,
click on Security options in this case, and Mark as not junk.
This is the thing.
It'll be called different things
in different programs and in different interfaces.
You may not have to go to another level
of submenu as I did here, but there should be something that allows
you to take a look at a message in the spam folder and tell your interface
or program that this is not spam and that's what I'll do.
As soon as I mark it as not junk, then I'll click OK.
And now what's also done is it's added leo@askleo.com to a list of email
addresses that it will always accept mail from.
But it's there in my inbox where it
belongs, and in theory it will never show up in the junk or spam folders again.
Now there is a catch.
I mentioned the dichotomy between desktop
email programs and web based email interfaces.
By web based, I mean things like Outlook.com
or gmail.com or whatever web based email interface you happen to be using.
The key is you're getting to that interface, using your browser.
Be it Edge or Chrome or Firefox or something else.
It's a web page that shows up in your
browser if that's how you access your email.
Actually, you're done.
You're doing everything you can to tell the spam filter that the email you have is
either spam or not spam, depending on how you market.
If you're using a desktop email program by desktop email program.
I mean programs like Microsoft Offices Outlook program.
This is different than Outlook.com, the Outlook program that comes
with Microsoft Office, Thunderbird, the Windows Mail program,
and any number of other programs that actually run on your PC
and download or otherwise access your email from your email service provider.
Here's the problem.
Your email program and your email service have two separate spam filters,
and ultimately you kind of sort of want to train them both.
But if you're going to train only one,
the one that matters the most is whichever is better.
Generally, that's the one at your email service.
So if you're running one of these desktop email programs and you mark something as
spam, or you mark something as not spam, that's great.
Your desktop email program may or may not
get better at recognizing or not recognizing spam in the future.
But what you probably want to do is
actually log into your email services web interface if they provide one,
and use that interface, especially when you are marking false positives.
In other words, especially if the email
never really even showed up in your email program because your email service
shuffled it off to a spam folder before you even downloaded it.
So that's something you may want
to consider doing is actually signing into your email services web interface,
looking at the spam folder that's provided there, and marking anything that shouldn't
be there that should have been delivered to you as not spam.
Now, there are scenarios where, honestly, training fails.
It just does, or it doesn't work fast enough.
Depending on the email service or the email spam filter that you happen
to be trying to train, the changes can take place almost
immediately, or they can take repeated suggestions.
Hey, email like this is not spam.
Email like this is not spam.
Eventually, the spam filter may get the message.
If you're impatient, there's another technique you can bring
to bear, and those are filters and allow lists.
As we saw with Outlook.com here a moment ago, as soon as I marked something not
junk, it took the sender address and added it to an allow list.
It should never mark email from that email address as spam again.
But depending on the service or provider you're using, depending on the email
program you're using, you may want to set something like this up yourself.
The way to do that varies depending on the email service you happen to be using.
With Outlook, you can go to its settings,
and over here you'll find something called Rules.
In Rules.
You can see that I already created a rule for my newsletter that categorizes things.
But another way to generate or use rules
is to have the rules say Never send this email to spam.
In the junk email settings, you have the opportunities to say not only
are these domains or senders completely blocked, they should always go to junk.
The safe senders and domains is another one that's important to understand.
You can see here that I actually have
the entire domain AskLeo.com set up as a safe sender.
It never should have gone to spam in the first place, and in fact, it didn't.
I did it manually for purposes
of the example, but you can see here it also added Leo@AskLeo.com as another
safe sender, specifically because I said this is not junk.
You can add things to this list. Unfortunately,
and this is where Outlook.com kind of falls down a little bit is I hear
repeated reports, repeated reports of people doing exactly
that, adding things to their allow lists or safe
sender lists, and still finding email from those addresses in their spam folders.
Same thing with mailing lists, which is ever so slightly different.
So it's not perfect, but it's an option.
Now, in the companion article for this video, I also go through setting up
a filter in Gmail that will do the same thing.
Gmail is significantly more reliable better spam filter in general
in my opinion, than Outlook.com. But the filtering process is also a little bit
more robust and a little bit more deterministic.
If you tell it, never send something to spam.
It will never send that thing to spam.
Whatever the criteria you happen to set up as so those are the things you can do.
The most important thing.
Make sure you mark your spam as spam.
Make sure you mark the false positives as not spam.
Make sure you're doing that with the right
interface, be it in your desktop email program or at your email service.
When all else fails, look into your email services ability
to set up rules or filters or allow lists to hopefully get that email to you.
And if those don't work when training
fails, honestly, I fall back to maybe it's time to use a different provider.
Maybe it's time to use a different tool.
Maybe it's time to use something that has
a better spam filter and gives you more control over what you're doing.
The bottom line here is very clear.
Regardless of what program or interface
you use, it would be well worth your time to investigate the alternatives,
the approaches and the tools that they provide to manage your spam.
Spam is not going away.
The tools are getting better, but they do require a little bit of work
on your end to get them fine tuned for updates.
For Comments for related Links
for that Gmail example and more, visit askleo.com/2017.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.