When I retired, I stopped using my university email address for my personal correspondence (probably not a good idea to begin with, but convenient to have all my email going to the same place) and someone suggested that I use a new email address consisting of my own name, i.e. Roger@rthat.com, BUT recently I’ve discovered that people are getting my emails sent to their spam or junk folders (what’s the difference anyway between those two?). I’ve had to follow up my emails when I’ve expected some response, and that email also winds in people’s spam folders.
What to do? Get a more conventional email address? I hate (HATE) Gmail, so not inclined to go there, but is there some other way to correct this problem? I wish the person who suggested it would have told me that this was a large possibility --I never would have considered rthat.com as a domain name if I’d thought so. I just thought it would be easier to remember since anyone writing to me would automatically know what my name is,
Big and not-so-big eMail providers do their own spam filtering by default, and their users assume that each piece of mail is examined. That is as may be, but one of the foremost filters is by the IP address that originated the mail. If the big and not-so-big eMail providers decide that your eMail provider is generating too much spam, they may just silently shut off accepting any mail from that source, which is radical. Alternatively they may flag it all as coming from a known spam generator, which I guess is not so radical.
Using a vanity domain name as you and I do indicates we likely are subscribers of one of dozens upon dozens of cut-rate Web and eMail service providers. These eMail service providers bundle outbound mail addresses and emit eMail pieces from a handful of servers, so you are likely sharing one outbound IP address with dozens if not hundreds of other subscribers. If any one of them gets tagged as a spam source, guess what? You and I and all their neighbors are instantly in the same boat, and all of our outbound mail is tagged as spam. It’s not fair, of course, but the big and not-so-big eMail providers are not known for playing fair.
What to do? The easiest thing is to wait. These IP filters are applied merely to frustrate spammers and are generally lifted within a day or two.
You could inveigle your recipients to disable their eMail providers’ spam filters. Good luck with that.
You could find out which eMail provider your recipient(s) use and set up an account there. They won’t filter their own mail. Hah, hah!
Ultimately, unless you are willing to upgrade your Internet provider subscription to include a static, unshared IP address, you really don’t have much leverage to exert with your own eMail provider. You certainly have no leverage at all with your recipients’ eMail providers.
Nothing it does makes sense to me. I can’t organize my emails, I can never find stuff in my sent files, I can’t even remember where a “reply” button is. Nothing Gmail does makes any sense to me.
The default Gmail configuration is too busy for me. With some settings you can simplify things a lot. What you could do is make a Gmail account and forward some mail there, then play with it at your leisure before considering switching to it.
I’d suggest clicking the gear in the upper-right corner and changing the Density to “Compact”, clicking Customize on the default inbox and unchecking all the categories, under Reading Pane clicking “No split”, and under Email Threading making sure that “Conversation view” is checked.
That will clean up your inbox a lot.
To find stuff in your Sent files click on Sent in the list of boxes on the left, then in the big blank at the top middle type what you want to search for. Gmail was built around search and it works well.
To reply to a message you have open, look in the upper right corner and click the left-facing arrow.
Like most other things it’s mostly a matter of getting used to it. Gmail is really good on spam filtering, that’s one of the things I like most about it.
When you had your university email, did you use your own email client like Outlook or Thunderbird? If so, you can get a gmail address and setup your email client to pull from gmail. You can view your email in your own local client rather than on gmail.com. The emails will still be on gmail.com if you wanted to view them there, but you wouldn’t have to. The emails would be in your local email client just like you had at the university.
One reason you get lots of spam is that spammers make up spam lists with all variations of names like first_name, last_name, fname-lname, initial-lname, etc. They don’t care if they are valid or not. So if you make an email like “John@domain.com”, you’ll get spam because John is well known first name. Make your email something that’s not a normal word or name, like JSmithSDMB1999@domain.com, to foil those automatically generated lists.
And one reason your mails are being marked as spam is because the spam filters think it’s suspicious when email comes from a random domain. The more suspicious the filter is, the more likely the email is put in spam.
You’ve said what the address is, but who is managing the computer that actually receives and sends the messages? As @CRhode alludes to, it is very difficult these days to be your own email provider. Long past is the time when you can just set something to listen on port 25, and call it a day.
In order for your emails to not be counted as spam you’ll need to start by setting up SPF, DKIM, and maybe DMARC. Those are all ways to assure the other end that it is really you sending the message.
The best way to handle this is to use a service provider that will let you bring your own domain (for a fee), and then they’ll tell you what you need to do to get everything configured. I think Apple recently started allowing this for as little as $0.99/month, but I know nothing about the details.
Basically, gmail also acts a standard email server using standard email protocols, so normal email clients are able to connect. Older email clients may have issues connecting to gmail if they don’t support modern email security protocols, so there’s a chance you may have to upgrade if your Outlook is old.
One good thing about going through gmail is that you get the benefit of their spam filtering. You may hardly ever get an actual spam getting through to your inbox.
I have to agree w/ @Roger_That; gmail has an awful UI
That’s the first thing I turn off when setting up email (on a phone). I can easily delete previous emails in a conversation if I want but find it much harder to find something in that @#$%& conversation view; it also tends to delete embedded pics
in the default view, it’s hard to get into the spam folder & I’m seeing more & more ‘real’ emails end up in there.
I’m told that your eMail provider will generally retry a certain number of times over a period of days before reflecting a “Can’t Deliver” message back to you. If your recipient’s eMail provider is accepting the mail and then sending it to the bit bucket, you’ll never know.
Is there some domain you could suggest that WON’T get marked as “spam” as easily as my “vanity” domain is? Yahoo, AOL, seem kinda 90s to me, but I don’t know which domains people use to avoid getting marked as “spam” reliably.
This is the correct answer if you want to keep your mail from going into spam-folders / quarantine. These are services used to authenticate you as a sender; if nothing of the sort is set up, many email providers will count your mail as ‘unauthenticated’ and consider it domain-spoofing (i. e. an attempt to send as @domain.com without actually being ‘allowed’ to do so). An SPF-record, for instance, basically is an entry in the global DNS that says ‘emails from these sources are allowed to send mails as @domain.com’, so whenever an email-system receives your mail, they check whether there’s an SPF-record and whether the mail originates from a system listed there.