By: Jeff Johnston
Q: My email program seems to be blocking out notices that are sent to me from an internet message board that I post on. But I never added their address to my "block sender" list, and it's not shown on the list either. How is this happening? - Susie, in U.S.A.
A: This is not an easy question to answer without more information. There could be a number of things happening here. A lot of this depends on your email program and who your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, is. Different email programs handle filtering in different ways.
You said that you did not add their address to your block sender list. It is possible though that you blocked them for another reason without realizing it. Carefully review your filter settings to ensure you are not blocking them for another reason. For example, you might be blocking them due to something in the subject line, ask the administrator of the board to send you the specifications for emails from the board. They should be able to tell you what the subject of the emails are and what is automatically added to each message. Also ask them for the IP address that emails are being sent from, if they can tell you this information it would be very helpful down the road if you find that it is not your email program filtering the messages.
It is possible that it is not your email program blocking the messages, but rather your ISP. Your ISP may consider the host of the message board to be a spammer and thus consider all emails from that domain to be spam. Several ISP's "blacklist" spammers for abuse of their email server. They consider it an abuse because all the incoming mail from spammers slows down service for all of their subscribers. Blacklisting spammers is a common practice, before you blame your ISP though you should carefully review your filtering rules to ensure you are not filtering the messages yourself. If you suspect that your ISP has blacklisted the domain you can phone or email them and request that the message board emails be removed from the blacklist. They may not wish to do this, but it never hurts to ask, they may be willing to consider it if they know that emails from the message board are not spam, but rather legitimate emails.
Most email programs place all blocked email into the trash bin or a filtered folder. Review these folders for a message from the board, if you see a message from them in either of these folders then it is definitely not your ISP blocking the messages. However if you are using a web based email program such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Outlook Web Access, your filtered mail may not show up in one of these folders and you will have to rely on your examination of the filtration rules you set up to determine if it was your mistake or your ISP's.