Issues at the recipient’s end

  1. All Internet Service Providers have some filtering going on and they will handle incoming emails in their own way.  Emails caught by such a system will either never be delivered to the individual, or will be put in a spam box on the server.   The settings of these filtering systems can be affected by the recipient organisation, and so an administrator may well change the settings for the whole school or company, if he or she feels that there is too much spam around.   Since no one sees the results of these changes they can be fairly destructive for incoming emails, and are generally the source of the problem where someone says, “I never get your emails”.

  1. Many spam boxes learn from the action of the email account holder.  Thus if the recipient moves a number of items into a spam box the system can “learn” about these items, and automatically look for words, phrases, addresses, links etc and put these in the spam box.  Generally you should never drop something into a spam box unless you know you don’t want anything else from that address, or with those words in it.  It is much safer to hit delete.  For emails with an unsubscribe button, hitting the unsub button is usually the most effective way forward.

  1. Most email programs (Outlook etc) have message rules sub-programs which allow the user to build in rules about certain emails.  A typical rule might be “if the email contains a particular phrase, put it into the spam box”.  The problem with this is twofold.  One is that it is easy to forget rules that one built a year ago.  The other is that the spam box can start learning and expanding the rules.

  1. Grey listing is used by many systems.  This means that if the system does not recognise an address, it rejects the email and puts it in spam.  It will then recognise the address if several more emails from the same address arrive – and eventually it stops blocking and allows the email through.  Quite why grey listing exists is beyond me, but it does.

  1. Anti-virus programs do contain their own email checking programs, although generally these are hidden away in the “advanced” settings, and few people change them from the standard settings.  Many of these programs use “Heuristics” (experience-based techniques that mean that as the system learns what emails are not wanted, and which emails have dangerous attachments), so it tends to block them or push them into spam boxes without the user every knowing why.

Issues at the sender’s end.

  1. Speed.  The speed at which emails are sent out can affect the delivery rate, and for this reason some senders (such as Hamilton House) run their systems at a very slow speed.

  1. Bounce rate.   Companies that clean up their lists very regularly have a greater chance of getting their emails through.  This affects people who buy in lists and then just use them over and over again.  Gradually servers to which their emails are directed become resistant to all email from that source and will block it.  This can particularly affect schools, where their servers are run via individual local authorities which monitor all the mail going into all the schools in the area.

As we can see from this, the cause of emails not arriving or being put into a spam box, are mostly with the recipient.  There are things that the sender can do, but much of the time it is a recipient issue.