Like most folks, I don’t pay too much attention to my junk mail folder. Today, I decided to clean house. To make sure I wasn’t throwing away something I wanted, I sorted through all of the porny emails to find that several I wanted to receive were in there. Mail was accumulated between 8/14 and 9/3:
Steven Crowder = 7 (YT video notifications & email distribution)
Candace Owens = 2 (YT video notifications)
Bill Whittle = 1 (YT video notification)
Senator Stone = 1 (he’s my Republican senator in California) email distribution
Dan Bongino = 1 (YT video notification)
Jack Hibbs (my favorite pastor) = 1 (YT video notification)
This happens to be a Gmail address. So it appears that in addition to their sneaky tricks on YouTube, Gmail is also in on the ‘banning’ activities. They mask it by letting some come through to your inbox so you think everything is fine.
Now Crowder sends out a few emails a week, so one could argue that due to repetitive messages, they think it’s spam. But my senator sends out an email once per quarter, so that logic doesn’t work there. So if you’re not getting the email notifications that you think you should be receiving, check your junk mail folder.
9 replies on “Check Your Junk Mail”
Time to get away from Gmail, don’t you think?
It’s my junk email account. My ‘real’ email is through another [safe] provider.
I recommend that you get off of Gmail. I now use a paid service ($50/year) that offers encryption. I also avoid Google search (I use DuckDuckGo).
I also use DuckDuckGo for browsing. The gmail account is my junk mail account.
I know it’s tempting to chalk this up as another example of censorship, the truth is that Google’s spam filters are largely crowd-sourced. If enough people flag emails as spam, that’s how GMail (and Hotmail, and Yahoo, etc) will treat them. The remedy is to mark them as Not Spam when it happens. Train the algorithm!
I went back to gmail and they’ve changed it since I last looked at it several years ago. There is no option to mark anything as spam. What they do is separate mail by category (promotional, etc.). The video emails come over as promotional and what they allow you to do is to mark as ‘not promotional’. I still don’t trust them : )
I had two from Blue Collar Logic in my spam folder. Make sure you mark the sender as Not Spam.
In Mac mail, you don’t have that option (I download from Gmail to my mail program). Other than adding the sender to your contacts (which I don’t want to do as there are too many), you can only move mail from the Junk folder to the Inbox. I’ll have to wait until I have more junk to go through to see if I can do it from within Gmail directly. At first glance at the menus, it doesn’t appear to offer that functionality either, but we shall see.
What you may need to do (and this goes for any client side e-mail programs, not just Mac Mail) is log into the Gmail site and mark items there as Not Spam or add the senders to the online Contacts/Address book/List.
Clients like Mac Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or the Microsoft Office Outlook (not outlook.com) can only handle mail they pull from the Inbox. Some mail providers do send both Inbox and SPAM folder content via POP3 but not all (and Google does NOT via Gmail).
IMAP connections which are far more common now will show the SPAM or Junk folder in the folder list but still do not generally provide a way to tell the provider something is or is not Junk. I suppose that is one way they can get you to occasionally log in and see ads to pay for your free e-mail hosting.