NOT RECEIVING CERTAIN E-MAILS? CHECK THIS FIRST - May 24th, 2011

I’m passing this on in the hope that it will save some frustration. I use Bellsouth (now ATT) as my service provider for both DSL and mail service. I also use Easylist on many of my client’s sites to develop their e-mail lists. Easylist is a double opt in program that sends a confirmation e-mail to the prospective recipient. They must responded to that e-mail before their e-mail address is added to the list. When setting up Easylist for a new client I discovered that I couldn’t receive the opt in e-mails on my Bellsouth account. I checked some of my other client’s installations and found that although the program had been working flawlessly for years, I now couldn’t receive e-mail from any of them either. After a long and frustrating investigation I determined that the program itself was operating correctly, I could receive the confirmation e-mails through other e-mail accounts, like gmail and that other Bellsouth accounts could receive them as well. The “obvious” conclusion? I was being blocked from getting these e-mails by my ISP. After few more weeks of frustration I was able to obtain a relevant e-mail log from my webhost, which after a half dozen support calls to Bellsouth I was able to pass on to their e-mail support team. After another half dozen calls, I discovered that in the interest of my safety, when Bellsouth (now ATT) moved to using Yahoo as their portal, they also changed the default setting of their Web Mail spam filter to "on", so that it stopped what THEY considered spam from ever leaving their server. Hence all of those confirmation e-mails were never downloaded to either my Outlook in box or junk mail box. Up to that point the default had always been “off” and the change in their policy was not evident to me since I never use their Web Mail interface. So the mystery was solved, I turned off their spam filter again and sorted out the few hundred e-mails in the Web Mail spam folder. The moral,... Check your Web Mail spam filter settings. It might save you needless hours of frustration.

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