Why don't I get my forwarded emails?

July 3, 2015 9:12 AM

I've been having trouble getting emails that are sent to my website address (ex [e-mail]) and are then forwarded to my regular email.

My web host says that it's due to increased spam protection and told me I should discontinue forwarding. Sometimes the emails take 24 hours to show up and some never arrive. I don't get email payment notifications from Paypal anymore but somehow spam still manages to get through.

I like having an email address that matches my domain name for my business. Is there any way to fix this or should I move to a different host?

posted by jabo to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Move to a different host, that host sucks. What sort of domain host can't figure out spam filters to the point where users don't get important emails??
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:21 AM on July 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sounds very much like spam filtering.

I'd suggest trying Fastmail. I have it picking up any address on my domain, and taking forwards from one of my gmail accounts. And as far as I can see everything gets through OK.

IMHO - you want your e-mail handled by e-mail professionals - either an e-mail specific provider or one of the major webmail sites. It's very hard to get right, and well meaning technicians can make mail very bad while trying to do the right thing.
posted by wotsac at 9:24 AM on July 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Depending on how the forwarding is done, it can cause SPF failures, which will sometimes cause mail to go into the spam folder. Moving hosts may or may not fix this. I'd recommend setting up your domain so that you can directly receive email for it at your mailbox, rather than having to forward it.
posted by primethyme at 10:13 AM on July 3, 2015

I agree that your e-mail host is probably filtering what it considers to be spam. The solution that has worked for me in the past is (if your ISP offers this feature) to whitelist the domains where the e-mail is coming from.

ISPs can handle spam by routing it to a junk mail folder or by not delivering it at all. For example, NTS subscribers don't receive e-mail from our organization because our web host's mail server is shared with dozens of other organizations, including some who do send spam. Because of those bad apples, the server is on an international blacklist (MIPspace). NTS discards messages from servers on the MIPspace list, unless the recipient has whitelisted the sender's domain.
posted by davcoo at 10:22 AM on July 3, 2015

Sounds like greylisting, where they filter out messages they think are spam and delete them and never tell you about them. When this happened to me, my solution was to ask them to disable all spam filtering on the server for my account so I could do it all on the user end. A middle ground might be to ask them to never delete anything but instead ask them to route it to a quarantine folder.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:06 AM on July 4, 2015