The short explanation here is that some incoming messages sent from a yahoo.com email address to a hosted fiestyturtles.com address are being marked as spam.
For the long explanation, let me try and explain what I know so far…
I recently discovered that I was not getting emails sent to my FT account from people with yahoo.com addresses. Ben said he sent me an email, yet I never received it. A few days later, he sent it again, and I still didn’t receive anything. Ben didn’t get any sort of error message on his end, but nothing ever showed up on my end. Hmmm…
I have an old yahoo address that I used to use, so I logged onto there and sent test messages directly to my gmail account, and also to each of my forwarded addresses. The message going straight to gmail made it, but the others disappeared. I didn’t get any sort of error message on either end. My email FT addresses don’t actually exist – they are simply forwards to my gmail account. I ended up posting in a tech forum and someone suggested checking my spam filters.
My web host uses SpamAssassin to filter incoming messages, and anything marked as spam is supposed to get sent to a spam folder on each person’s mailbox. I’ve had good experiences with SA, and for the most part it has seemed to catch most spam. But because my mail is being forwarded to gmail (whose spam filtering seems to be phenomenally better!), I didn’t think the SA filter would apply. Apparently I was wrong.
Even thought I didn’t think it would matter, I added “*@yahoo.com” to my SpamAssassin whitelist, allowing anything from yahoo.com to come through. And then I finally received a test message that I sent myself. What seems to have been happening is that for some reason messages from yahoo.com were being flagged as spam, and those messages are supposed to be dumped into a spambox for later viewing. However, because my addresses aren’t actual mailboxes, just filters, the spam went into the ether of the Intertubes, and no one was the wiser. Ben didn’t know because as far as Yahoo was concerned, the mail was sent and received. I didn’t know, because I never received it. Gahhhh!
Further complicating things was that I actually had received an email from Tracy, who is also a yahoo address, the same day.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:48 pm
In case you didn’t know, you should have a “spambox” folder underneath your inbox. You might have to go to folder management and add it….I thought it was automatically added in the webmail, but you might have to look. It’s probably best to just go through it every once in awhile and make sure nothing legit was caught. If something’s in there that shouldn’t send me the email address and I’ll add it to the whitelist. Maybe I’ll see if there’s a way for individuals to change settings for each person, but I don’t think that’s how it’s set up :-/.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:53 pm
hmm, now that you mention it…swf said she sent me an email that i never got. I’ll have to check the spam folder.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:55 pm
this sucks, one of flasck’s emails got marked as spam too
December 21st, 2006 at 10:05 pm
it looks like it is a recent thing. I had two emails from SWF and two from Flasck that were marked as spam in the past couple of weeks. I scrolled thru the last couple months of spam and didn’t see anything else unusual.
December 21st, 2006 at 10:07 pm
(so please add SWF’s yahoo account and Flasck’s hotmail account to the whitelist)
December 21st, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Noted. I’d went through and added all the “crew” that I know….I just don’t know what other contacts other people might have. The whole stupid thing seems random….I’d turn off SpamAssassin altogether but I think it catches a whole lot more than it falsely catches. I guess my preference would be to occasionally go through the spam folder rather than have the inbox clogged up with junk and have to filter it out that way. Server side filtering is usually a lot better way to go. I dunno….the Internet is a mess.
On another hand, I’ve been very impressed with gmail’s spam filtering. Aside from this little fiasco that was dropping most of the spam (eh, I guess it still is except for what I’ve whitelisted…..hrmmm), that which gets through gets accurately flagged. I guess we’ll just keep an eye on it – at least now we know. And Knowing Is Half The Battle.