If you send an email and don't receive a reply, it will appear as if the recipient hasn't had time to read it or worse - deleted it without reading it! But sometimes, this just isn't the case...
Email spam - the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages - is taking its toll on email systems around the world. This has an effect on emails from trustworthy sources.
In today's world, 90% of email traffic in North America, Europe and Australasia is spam, according to Spamhaus.org. Because of this, many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are using stricter rules to try to filter out spam emails from the legitimate emails that are going to their customers. Although attempts to conquer spam should be commended, it can cause some inconvenience to us, the end users, where "friendly" emails from trusted sources are accidentally marked as junk and put into a junk mail folder, or simply blocked before getting through to our email clients.
What can we do to keep on receiving "friendly" email?
One way to make sure that email you are expecting gets through to your inbox is to add the email address(es) of "friendly" senders to your mail provider's "white list". A white list is a list of trusted email addresses and domains - any email from a white listed sender is passed through to your inbox. Conversely, there are "black lists" - where email addresses and domains used for spamming or other malicious activities are listed. The senders of incoming emails are often checked against black lists before the email is passed on to the recipient. Many large organisations have their own white and black lists, so you may have to speak to your IT department or network administrator to have email addresses that you know are safe, added to your organisation's white list.
If you use Outlook, you can also add senders to a personal whitelist, known as the safe senders list. If an email appears in your junk email folder rather than your inbox, you can right-click on the email, hover over the Junk E-mail option and then select "Add Sender to Safe Senders List" to add this sender to your safe list. See the image below for an example of the menu (taken from Outlook 2007).
You could also select "Add Sender's Domain (@example.com) to Safe Senders List" to add the domain, rather than the individual address to your safe list. For example, if you did the above on an email from example@gaelquality.com, it would add all addresses used by Gael to your safe list.
If you do get any unwanted email messages that you consider spam into your inbox, you can follow the same procedure, but select "Add Sender to Blocked Senders List" to block that address.
Another method is to add the email address(es) that the email originates from. For example, if you receive a regular newsletter from "Company PLC" that comes from the address newsletter@companyplc.com, you should add that email address to your email address book. In Outlook, you would do this by opening the address book and creating a new entry. This method is more useful for personal webmail accounts, such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.
Help us to help you
We've found that on rare occasions, our emails don't get through to all the recipients they're supposed to. This could be due to extra security by your ISP or organisation, or down to filters that block images or certain keywords. Help us to help you by adding our email addresses to your organisation's white list or to your own address book. Outlook normally blocks images in emails unless the email comes from a known user or someone you've added to your safe senders list - adding our email addresses means you'll not have to click any buttons to show the images in our emails. There are two potential problems: some emails may come through to you and get put into your junk/spam folder; or some emails may be blocked by your ISP or IT department before the email gets onto your network and to your PC.
To stop email messages being stopped by your ISP or IT department, you should contact your postmaster and request to have email from @gaelquality.com “un-blocked.”
Email blocking occurs when the receiving email server (e.g. Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, your organisation, etc.) prevents an inbound email from reaching the inbox of the intended recipient. Most of the time the sender of the email receives a “bounce” message notifying the sender that their email has been blocked.
To stop messages from us going into your junk/spam folder, you should add the domain @gaelquality.com to your safe sender's list.
Outlook 2007
- If you have an email from any one of our email addresses (such as example@gaelquality.com), or get an email from us in the near future, find it in your inbox.
- Right click the email message.
- Select "Junk Mail" and click "Add Sender's Domain to Safe Senders List", as shown below.
Outlook 2003
You can add our domain name to the Safe Senders List by doing the following:
- On the Tools menu, click Options.
- On the Preferences tab, under E-mail, click Junk E-mail.
- Click the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients tab.
- Click Add.
- In the Enter an e-mail address or Internet domain name to be added to the list box, enter the name or address you want added, and then click OK.
If you are expecting an email from us and have not received it, please give us a phone on +44 (0) 1355 593200 and we'll investigate the issue further.