Microsoft Outlook.com automatically treats all BF emails as spam

[Ed Mullen]

I just thought I should bring it to everyone's attention that outlook.com email automatically sends all emails from Biblical Families to the Spam or Junk folder. I told Outlook twice that this was not spam but it continues to put BF emails into the spam folder. Obviously they are doing everything to fight us. I don't know what we can do to fight back against a superpower like Microsoft but one day God will prevail over the evil American culture.

 

[FollowingHim]

This is fairly standard these days as email providers try to reduce spam with automated filters. In our case, the forum sends many automated emails, and with thousands of forum members, there will be a lot that remove these by labelling them spam. This feeds the learning algorithms and causes it to think the forum's emails are spam. A few "not-spam" checkboxes by one user won't immediately change the algorithms - but if you keep labelling them that way, you'll probably find there's a tipping point where they start landing in your inbox. It's just the way this technology works. I even get important business emails landing in spam. There's no reason to see this as a conspiracy against this website specifically.

Welcome to the forum though!

 

[rockfox]

It may be worth considering reducing the emails that the forum is able to send; or at least what it defaults to send. If this is bad enough the major filter companies could mark us as a bad actor which would affect newsletter delivery rates.

 

[nathan]

You have some control over what comes from forums@biblicalfamilies.org in your account settings, under Preferences, uncheck "and receive email notifications of replies".
Under Privacy you can uncheck "Receive site mailings" - but we rarely use this after someone signs up.

I'm more concerned about emails from "newsletter@biblicalfamilies.org" (the 10 times a year or so newsletter) - we try to follow Mailchimp's rules for not getting marked as Spam (and we don't get blacklisted by the major email players - we'd know if that first-level bounce was happening). But what happens at the individual gmail or outlook mailbox level is hard to control. I'm going to add a survey here - if you are on the forum (and used a legit email address that still works), you should have gotten the last newsletter on 5/30 - I'm going to start a survey, see what people say about getting it.

 

[rockfox]

Yes that was my concern as well. Just to be clear my point is that emails from forums@ getting marked as spam could get the whole domain flagged and affect delivery of newsletter@.