Troubleshooting Email

“The spam filter ate it!”

There are several reasons why an email won’t go through.

1. Malformed Address

   Check the address. The first thing to check is that you’re sending the email to the correct address.  I have mistyped hundreds of email addresses in my lifetime, sending responses to strangers instead of colleagues or relatives.  I have received invitations to weddings, notes for meetings, and even legal opinions from lawyers.  It happens to everyone, so if your email isn’t being answered, double-check the recipient.  Check “.ca” vs “.com” as well.

   Some email programs, Outlook for example, will not check email addresses before sending them.  If the email is invalid, (e.g. being sent to support@busix.cp, instead of support@busix.com) it will not supply an error but leave the email unsent in the Outbox.

2. Domain Expired

   If you have your own domain, you may have missed the notes in your backup email about your domain expiring.  If you did not pay your registrar, then you will not be able to send anything from your address at all.  Hopefully, you can just renew it and it hasn’t been poached by someone else.

3. Spam Filtering

   More than half of all email sent is spam.  Most people don’t see it because the computers hosting email programs filter out and drop known spam emails.  The downside is that sometimes your legitimate email gets flagged as spam and it just gets deleted before a human ever sees it.  A few reasons why are:

   1. Content flag
      Check your content.  When I had just bought my first house and was securing the financing, I made the mistake of putting “mortgage” in the subject header.  Now, if you send an email that says, “check this out!” and a link, odds are very high that you’ll get flagged as spam.
   2. ISP filtering
      Your ISP may be filtering the email based on the settings you set, or the settings in their system.  You can bypass this on a per-account basis.
      Some accounts like Gmail use an adaptive filter.  If you get updates from a website and never read them, the filter will start to flag those as spam.  If other Gmail users flag them as spam, they can also get flagged.
   3. Host filtering
      If you have the misfortune of picking a host that has sent spam (usually the result of a hack) then the spam filters can block everything from that host.  If they are using virtual servers, you may be on the same computer as a spam host, causing your emails to get flagged as spam.
   4. IP blacklist
      Perhaps the last person to have your IP address was a known spam host, and through misfortune, you have their old IP address (imagine if your new phone number used to belong to a pizza place). Unfortunately, there’s not a lot that can be done about this.  You can check your host through a blacklist watch site like Anti-Abuse and contact the blacklist maintainers if you’re listed as a bad sender.