Internet help ?

EycplUK

Would be helpful if someone could explain how to check spam filters !

agarnett

OP, it is an unfortunate fact that email providers in their automatic attempts to protect you from Spam, very often will divert suspected, but actually quite safe emails from unrecognised contacts which contain certain words or possibly certain internet routings which are unfortunately also known to be symptomatic of Spam. An internet routing from Belgium might be enough to trip it - Belgium doesn't exactly have a reputation for being highly regulated in many respects - more one for blind eyes!

First, have you now found the missing emails? When they are "caught" as Spam, they aren't usually immediately deleted. Have you looked in your other email folders, particularly the Spam folder for them? If you are not using webmail, you may not see a Spam folder visible in Outlook or Thunderbird if one of those is the program you use to view your emails? I think you can only see the contents of your Yahoo Spam folder if you login via webmail at https://login.yahoo.com/

If the email provider (in this case it seems to be Yahoo) doesn't recognise the source of an incoming email when it compares it with your contact list, or with a specific exception you have notified in your email settings as a safe email address, genuine emails might end up misdirected to a folder commonly labelled "Spam" alongside your Inbox/Sent/Drafts/Trash/Deleted/Junk Mail folders (yes your provider might automatically give you folders with all those names as well as one named Spam, whether you want them or not!). I am not sure Yahoo automatically sets up a Junk Mail folder for each email account or even a Deleted Items folder, but it definitely sets up Spam and Trash folders.

Whilst Trash, Deleted and Junk all sound like they might be an acceptable home for real Spam, the "Spam" folder is the one most likely to contain your missing incoming emails, but depending how you view your emails, filtered out Spam may not be visible to you.

I am not an expert in fixing the problem but have suffered it a few times recently with routine emails from a completely pukka professional firm, with which I had started to deal, but hadn't previously dealt with. I made the same mistake twice effectively, because after the first occasion I saved the contact details as one of my contacts, and thought I'd fixed it. Then unexpectedly my contact asked one of their colleagues to send an email to me, and because the colleague's email address was slightly different and not on my contact list, that too went into the Spam folder! What caused either to be identified as suspected Spam I have no idea - the firm isn't Belgian! And plenty of real unwanted Spam still gets through to me! The way the filters work sometimes all looks a bit inconsistent and unfathomable !

If you want a reliable fix to be offered by the good folks here in the Techie Forum (tailored to your particular email provider's likely whims and foibles), you can perhaps afford to reaffirm a few more details here in the thread, but first I must say DO NOT give your full email address or even the domain name in your email address (the bit after the @ sign) unless it is indeed a generic yahoo.com, ymail.com, or yahoo.co.uk type common or garden / off the shelf email address, or if you are using Yahoo to access a gmail.com or AOL.com or Outlook.com address.

I am not at all sure it is very likely that your particular internet provider BT would be preventing you receiving your Yahoo emails, so I think you can dismiss that as probably not part of the problem for the moment. It'll almost certainly be Yahoo who are responsible for diverting the missing emails to a folder where you haven't yet found them

If your email address actually isn't on one of those standard Yahoo domains and does in fact use a different domain name that you or someone you know controls, it might help if you know and can reconfirm who truly hosts your email. Is it really Yahoo? It perhaps doesn't have to be. I think so far they offeraccess not just to their own, but also to the common Google, AOL and Outlook ones I mentioned. Again, DO NOT state your domain name if it is unique to you or to your employer or to associates e.g. an educational establishment. They will not thank you for that! I guess it is theoretically possible that you could access for example an educational institution's personally allocated email address via Yahoo, even if actually it is hosted by Google as many institutions have let Google host their emails now. Sounds complicated and a bit like a Russian Doll type set up (email host accessed from within another email host). Dismiss that notion immediately if your email is clearly a standard Yahoo email address!

For example, though, can you / do you normally access your Yahoo email via any web browser i.e. via webmail? Or do you normally use Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird or similar or perhaps a mobile phone or tablet?

You might only be able to see what has dropped into your Spam folder by logging in via webmail.

esuhl

EycplUK wrote: »

Would be helpful if someone could explain how to check spam filters !

If you log in to your email provider's web service, you should be able to check the contents of your folders (including spam folder), and have a way to change or enable/disable any spam filters that might be in use.