I’m not receiving the emails I expect. What should I do?
As someone once said: ‘ It’s not surprising when some emails don’t find their destination. The real miracle is that email works at all.’
Since we all developed a rather high dependence (addition) on email, to say the very least, it is inconvenient when we don’t receive the emails we expect.
With the increases in spam, ransomware and phishing attacks, organizations are looking for more ways to allow the ‘right’ email through while keeping the ‘wrong’ email out. We are losing the battle. Emails must navigate many more hurdles and obstacles than they did just a few short years ago to land in your inbox. There are several ways emails can get redirected before they reach you, but the good news is we have more tools to help us manage the process. We have only to become practiced in using those tools.
As an email steams toward your inbox at the speed of the Internet, there are three major roadblocks it must successfully navigate. Unfortunately for us humans, most of the time, each of these roadblocks is governed by a set of automatic rules.
Similar to when you go to the airport, you must navigate certain hurdles before getting on the plane. At each step – check-in, security and boarding – identify yourself and convince the numerous ‘gatekeepers’ you are who you say you are and allow you on the plane. Similarly, an email must find your organization’s server, find your account on the server, and locate your inbox. It must do all that while, at each step, convincing various algorithms and systems to allow it into your inbox.
In the descriptions below, I have described the hurdles an email has to get through, from the email’s perspective, as it approaches your inbox. In all practicality, when you suspect you are not getting email, check these in reverse order:
1. Check your Social, Promotion or Other Tabs
2. Check your spam and junk folders
3. Check with your IT folks to see if the email is in quarantine
The First Roadblock: Server SPAM Flags and the Dreaded Quarantine
This is the hardest to fix yourself. Because this process involves your email server identifying potential spam our malicious content in an email and redirecting it to quarantine before it reaches your computer, it almost always requires the assistance of your IT department to check if your email is getting sent to quarantine. Sometimes these are third party spam filters that sift through all the mail sent to your organization’s domain and sometimes these are systems put in place and managed by your IT department. While it can be frustrating, these are important tools your IT folks use to help keep malicious content from reaching your inbox.
There can be many reasons that an email gets flagged as “bad” and sent to quarantine. If could have a suspicious attachment. I may have links or be formatted in such a way that it looks like spam. It could be that the sender of the email is sending from a blocked or masked IP address.
The first roadblock is the hardest to monitor because this (almost) always involves asking your IT folks for help. If you suspect that you are not getting certain email, please first check the two options below. If it is clear that the email never reached your computer, then reach out to your IT folks (whoever hosts your email) and ask them to check the quarantine folder for specific emails.
If the emails are getting quarantined, you can ask them to set their system to always allow that email through. You might also ask them if the system they are using allows you to set rules and/or gives you access to an individual page where you can check your quarantine from time to time without bothering them.
The Second Roadblock: Your Spam Folder
This is the hardest to fix yourself. Because this process involves your email server identifying potential spam, our malicious content in an email and redirecting it to quarantine before it reaches your computer, it almost always requires the assistance of your IT department to check if your email is getting sent to quarantine. Sometimes these take the form of third party spam filters which sift through all the mail sent to your organization’s domain and sometimes these are systems put in place and managed by your IT department. While it can be frustrating, these are important tools your IT folks implement to help keep malicious content from reaching your inbox.
There can be many reasons an email gets flagged as “bad” and sent to quarantine. The email might have a suspicious attachment. It may have links or be formatted in such a way to look like spam. It could be sent from a blocked or masked IP address.
The first roadblock is the hardest to monitor because this (almost) always involves asking your IT folks for help. If you suspect you are not getting certain email, please first check the two options below. If it is clear that the email never reached your computer, then reach out to your IT folks (whoever hosts your email) and ask them to check the quarantine folder for specific emails.If the emails are getting quarantined, you can ask them to set the system to always allow that email through. You might also ask them if the system they are using allows you to set rules and/or gives you access to an individual page where you can check your quarantine from time to time without bothering them.
The Third Roadblock: Focused and Social Folders
Finally, there is a relatively new roadblock inbound emails must navigate: the dreaded promotion or other tab.
This is a fairly new issue that has arisen over the past couple of years. Both Microsoft and Google have taken it upon themselves to add additional tabs at the top of our email clients. These are meant to help segment the “inbox” into different parts, presumably to help us focus on the ‘important’ email first. Ideally, emails from your co-workers, friends and family will show up in the main or focused tab and the massive amount of promotional and social media notifications we get go into the other tabs.
This can be a valuable tool that might help us stay focused on the most important emails first. But, like the spam/junk we need to train ourselves to use them and then train our clients to reduce false positives.
Check these “other” tabs first when you suspect that you have not received an email.