Why Am I Not Able To Receive Emails From A Certain Email Address?

I wonder if you can advise me as to why my laptop is not accepting emails from a certain email address? It has not happened before and I receive everyone else's OK. The person sending them seems to think it's my fault - not theirs! Katy from Bañares, Alicante.

I know how frustrating this can be. You have no way of knowing that they have sent you something and they have no way of knowing that you didn’t get it! Your friend is half right: it’s not their fault! But it is probably not yours either.

Here are the most common problems:

1. The email is in your “junk or spam mail” folder.

2. You have a filter or rule set up that is applying to these emails and moving it, deleting it or doing something else to it.

3. Add your friend to your contacts /address list. This effectively creates a “whitelist” in most email providers and increases the chance of it being accepted.

4. Ask your friend to send a simple email that doesn’t contain anything that could be deemed Spam. Unfortunately, legitimate messages about free offers, opportunities, breast cancer etc can be trapped by spam or junk filters.

The chances are this will solve your problem but you might ask why your friend wasn’t notified that Hotmail has rejected their email. They don’t send a ‘bounced’ message because if this really was spam this reply would effectively validate your email address and they could target you more carefully. I have had to change the way I send my newsletters out because they were filtered out by Hotmail and Yahoo as spam.

If this doesn’t work or you don’t want to put up with having little control over what emails you receive then consider changing email providers. I think that Gmail is a good provider (FREE) with better spam control and it comes with many useful features. I would recommend Gmail over the other free providers such as: Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Telefonica, Wanadoo ...!

If you change your email provider I recommend keeping your old one and auto forwarding your email from the old one to the new one. How you do this varies with each provider. This ensures that you don't miss any emails during the transition and you can even use the old one as a backup for your emails: once you have notified everyone of your old one then turn off the autoforward on the old account and setup an autoforward on the new one back to the old. Never lose an email again!

Internet & Web