Twice now I’ve received emails from old friends I knew in high school. Or I should say twice that I know of, because I managed to just barely snatch their emails from my traditional just-in-case quick scan of my spam folder. In both cases I replied but didn’t hear again, and I have to wonder, since a lot of people aren’t familiar enough with their email service’s spam settings to check such things, whether my replies in return also got caught in a spam filter.
It seems silly that the simple act of emailing someone directly wouldn’t automatically add them to whatever list your filter rules use to determine that something isn’t spam, but certainly I know I’ve had replies to my own email end up in my junk mail folder. Don’t get me wrong, I like an active spam filter, but that’s a bit overzealous. It’s particularly annoying when I can’t see anything in the email that should have triggered a filter–no links, no commercial messages, nothing.
This, to me, is the real annoyance with spam. I can roll my eyes wearily and deal with deleting spam, particularly now that spam filters have become so prevalent (the spam filter than handles trackbacks and comments on this blog software, for example, is pretty darn impressive). But I get annoyed when I miss actual email I’d like to read, or my own emails vanish into the ether.
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