Why can't I get emails from one person?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
Here's the question. "Why can't I receive emails from one of my contacts?
He always confirms that he sent sent the email to my hotmail."
This is frustratingly common.
It really is frustrating because there's always that one person who's sending you
messages and they just never, ever show up.
Let's look at what some of the possible things that could be going on might be.
First, I know this one's super obvious, but I have to be complete.
Make sure they're sending to the right email address.
Any little typo, the smallest of typos,
will render it to be a different email address and therefore not get to you.
Similarly, if they've ever typoed it once
and they are entering the correct email address,
then it's possible that some email programs will basically try
to autocomplete or auto fill what it remembers them having sent to before.
So they need to be very careful about
making sure that when they are done, when they have filled in the email address
they're sending to, that it is in fact exactly correct.
So with that out of the way, what else?
Well, the number one thing we almost always say is check your spam folder.
Make sure that the messages they're
sending you aren't being automatically filtered to spam for some reason.
Now that can happen for a number of different reasons.
I get that. And it's not always easy to tell exactly
why one message might be sent to spam and another might not.
If it is consistently showing up in your spam folder, then you might want to look
into your email program's ability to set up an allow list or some kind of a filter
or rule that would say never send messages from this sender to spam.
Also, if you do find it in your spam folder, make sure to mark it as not spam.
Exactly how you do that depends on the program you're using.
But for the most part it involves right
clicking on the message and then selecting a not spam or not junk kind of an option.
But that will help train the spam filter
to not consider emails from this person as spam in the future.
It'll take some time,
sometimes a long time, sometimes it'll feel like a very long time.
Lots of repeated trainings before it really kicks in.
But that's something you could do if it's showing up in the spam folder.
Now, one thing you might want to do is ask the sender if they ever get a bounce.
In other words, when they send an email message to you, are they getting abouts?
They might even have to look in their spam folder.
That could happen as well.
But the bottom line is that if they're
getting a bounce, there is information in that bounce.
There's information that they need to pay attention to about exactly why the message
was bounced back to them because it wasn't delivered to you, something's wrong.
That bounce message should hopefully at least give them a clue.
So what if there's no trace,
there's no bounce, it's not in your spam folder, it's just, it never arrives.
There are two scenarios that are at least worth considering.
One is your friend is a spammer, right?
Your friend routinely sends spam.
Your friend routinely sends email that at least to the email system,
your email system specifically, looks
enough like spam that it doesn't even give the message a chance.
It just doesn't.
Whatever the reason is that email, that person that sender has such a bad
reputation that it's not even getting thrown into your spam folder.
Another scenario is the service that your sender is using.
Very often the reputation of that service
contributes to their messages, even good ones, sometimes being flagged as spam.
And that's simply because other people on that service are using it to send spam.
The whole service suffers for the bad
reputation that they then earn by being seen as source of spam.
If your sender is using a service that's in that situation, same thing.
Your service, the service you're receiving email on may just consider his service
to be so disreputable as to really have a number of strikes against it before
the message is even examined for potentially being spammed.
So those are the kinds of things that you can look at.
I really don't know of any solutions here.
The real solution, if this is consistent
and this is a solution you can test, is for either you or your sender to use
a different email service to give it a try from a different email service to see if
the combination changing either the recipient or the sender's email
service will allow the message to come through.
If it does, then you know that, well,
maybe that's what needs to happen for that specific person.
Now I do have to put in a word about Microsoft.
You mentioned that you're using a Hotmail account owned by Microsoft,
serviced by Outlook.com. Microsoft's email service is frustrating.
It is consistently inconsistent about how it deals with spam.
I don't mean that to be particularly derogatory about Microsoft,
but the fact is the experience is that Microsoft's own spam filter can
at times be really good and at times be really off the mark.
And that is really frustrating.
So that's one of the reasons that I always
question the recipient's mail service if the mail service happens to be Microsoft.
In a case like that,
my recommendation in general is to see if you can't use a different email service.
Gmail currently being one of the best spam filters around and having been one
of the best spam filters around now for many, many years.
So I hope that's helpful.
I hope that helps you get the message across.
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for links related to this article and more, visit AskLeo.com/146609
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.