Some email providers treat some incoming mail as suspicious and place the email in a junk folder. Sometimes the recipient is not made aware of this and never realise an email was even sent.

Smartspace, along with many other providers who facilitate the sending of bulk emails(probably dozens of providers from Google down to many small providers), often have this problem. It happens because the reply to sender is a different email the server from which the email originates.

Whilst Smartspace does everything it can to avoid this, sometimes the receiving server treats it this way no matter what.

What Senders Can Do

In Smartspace, senders are often clubs and small businesses who know their clients or members well. If this is the case you should advise the recipients (possibly through means other than email) of some of the techniques explained below.

In Australia, the following email providers are brutal when it comes to handling mail from bulk senders and anyone else to them looks the slightest bit suspicious. Customers and members with email addresses under the following domain names may experience problems. The first two listed below are very likely to junk emails, and the second two may junk emails depending on personal settings.

• optusnet.com.au (and other possible optus domains)
• me.com (including other apple domains such as icloud.com)
• yahoo.com (and other related domain names)
• hotmail.com (including live.com and outlook.com)

What Users and Recipients Can Do

General Advice

Users should always first check their junk folder before declaring that an email has not arrived. This may be either through their email program on their computer or their webmail interface (eg hotmal, gmail)

If this is the case, many systems have ways of "whitelisting" some email address or domains. Whitelisting is, as it suggests, the opposite of blacklisting or banning email sources.

When a domain or address is whitelisted, the email system gives special treatment to any emails which meet the whitelisting criteria, and takes the action which can also by configured in some cases.

Sometimes these whitelisting systems can be found under filters in the email program or system. In these systems, generally all incoming mail goes through the filter before the system decides what to do with it.

Also, placing an email address into an address book, may also have the effect of whitelisting an email address. This is especially true for online systems.

Specific Advice For Specific Systems

Optus

At pesent, optus are probably the biggest problem for senders/receivers as they have a wide reach and are completely opaque on how their spam prevention systems work. They do not even tell their clients that email is not reaching them. This is particularly true if they get their email downloaded onto their computers using programs like Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

With Optus, users will need to viisit the Optus webmail system online and access their emails that way. You may find the emails in your junk folder if the emails were sent not more than 21 days ago.

You should place the senders email address into your online Optus address book for these emails to be allowed through to your computer's email program.

They delete email from the junk folder after 21 days. The link below explains more fully a technique to be able to prevent these emails from going into junk. Note the second last post on the page.

https://community.optus.com.au/t5/Broadband-Telephony/Spam-filter/td-p/39836/page/7

If that solution does not work, you should phone Optus and report this unwanted behaviour of their email system. You probably should phone Optus anyway and aqdvise that you want to receive these emails.

It is likely that you are missing out on other emails as well, but probably do not know it.

Me.com and Icloud.com

For me.com and iclouod customers, You may be able to do something similar to the solution above, but if that is not available, you should ring their support number and let them know the problem.

It has been reported that they will, unlike Optus, attempt to do something about it.

GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo

Generally, if you follow the advice provided in the general section above, you may be able to prevent junking of emails.

Alternatively, placing the senders address into your address book may also help.