OK, there are three people in this scenario: A, B, and C. (Actually, A is my father, who’s fairly tech-savvy. B and C are a couple of his friends.) This has been going on for at least a few months.
A can send e-mail to B, no problem. But if B sends e-mail to A, it just disappears. A knows to check his spam filter, and it’s not in there.
A cannot send e-mail to C. Same thing: it just disappears, it’s not in spam, etc. I think C can send e-mail to A, but I’m not sure. As far as I know, all three have no trouble sending and receiving e-mails to anyone else, including people using the same ISPs.
A is using Outlook with a comcast.net e-mail address. B’s e-mail is mindspring.com, and C’s is Yahoo.
It seems very odd that A can’t receive from one person and can’t send to a different person, but as far as I know has no trouble sending or receiving to/from anyone else. Any thoughts?
I had similar experiences a few years ago when (a) I found that email from my Earthlink account was not getting through to an address at a Canadian University that I was trying to contact, and (b) at a later time, we realized that no emails sent by my wife from the law firm where she worked were getting through to me. In both cases it appeared to be a result of overenthusiastic spam-blocking measures, blacklisting of whole domains, by service providers. I really don’t know what the Canadian University can have been thinking to block the whole of a major ISP (it was then, anyway) like Earthlink, but it appears Earthlink was mistakenly blocking my wife’s firm because its domain name was rather similar to a rogue Chinese site (Google was listing it as a site attempting to breach browser security).
Another thing I experienced (also a few years ago) was having a particular email completely blocked by a system because it had a zip file attached. I can appreciate why they might be suspicious of zip files, I guess, but why they could not either simply strip the attachment and let the message through, or at least bounce back an “undeliverable” message to me, I do not understand. As it was, I very nearly ended up failing a course I was taking for not doing my “homework”.
I don’t know if spam-blocking techniques have improved so as to give fewer false positives since then (or of the Comcast whitelisting facility mentioned by ZipperJJ will solve your problem). If not, it may call for the contacting of relevant ISP to get this sorted out. I haven’t noticed it happening to me lately, but, of course, you never really know whether email is not getting through or if someone is simply ignoring you.