I
need to receive emails from my bank, and so I set up a “white list” in the
email client (Microsoft Outlook) on my computer. The problem is that often,
emails from my bank end up in my Spam folder in Outlook. What’s going on? Why
isn’t Outlook doing what I asked?
Although we can’t tell you exactly
what’s going on without investigating your email specifically, we have a good
guess. If you’re using Outlook, most likely you’re retrieving email from an
email server like Microsoft Exchange, or Outlook.com, or even Gmail. Each of
these email servers provide their own spam filtering, and their own sets of
rules that control what they do with email as it arrives. You’ve also set up a
white list in the email client, on your computer. When someone sends you an
email, it first arrives on your email server, gets processed there, and then, when
you ask Outlook to retrieve your email, Outlook performs its own spam
filtering. The simplest solution is to add any white lists you want managing
your email filtering on the server, not on your client. There are two reasons
why this is a better solution than asking Outlook to perform this task.
Remember that the email server gets “first dibs” on handling the email. If the
server determines that the email is spam (even though you think it isn’t), the
server will filter the email and treat it as spam. If you set up the white list
on the server, then the email server can correctly classify the email as you
intend, before it gets sent down to your email client. Also, if you perform
this sort of spam filtering on the server, then every email client you use (including
your desktop computer, your phone, and your tablet) all inherit the same email
filtering rules. Each of these client applications retrieves email from the
same server, and if the server handles filtering, then each client gets the
benefit of the server’s spam filters. If you set up a white list in Outlook,
only Outlook “sees” the email filtering, and all other clients see the
filtering on the server. This can lead to confusing situations in which email
appears on one device, but not another.
We suggest that you always attempt to perform
any email filtering on your email server. If you’re confused about how to do
that, either speak to your email administrator (assuming you have one, if
you’re working at a company that handles your email), or search the Web for
something like “email white list Exchange server” (substituting your email
server as necessary). You’ll always get better results doing as much work as
possible on the server
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