I am encountering difficulties receiving email from certain people, particularly from Hotmail addresses. Some people who I contact regularly, and some who I infrequently contact, have reported that they send me an email but I have not received the message. This makes me concerned that they are sending me email which is not getting through. It does not seem to matter whether the sender uses the reply option or composes a new email to me. I recently changed ISPs but the problem existed before changing to our new ISP. The computer is running Windows XP with Outlook Express for email.

Since the problem occurred before changing ISPs we can assume that the problem relates to your computer rather than the internet connection or ISP. There are a few possible reasons for this behaviour, and to begin we will go through the most likely causes. First, if you are running any spam blocking software on the computer then the messages may have been mistakenly tagged as spam and quarantined. A lot of computer security packages include anti-spam products, so you may not even be aware that you are running a spam blocker on the computer. The best way to check whether you are running a spam blocker is open your antivirus or other security software on the computer and check whether there is a spam blocker component that is currently enabled. If there is a spam blocker installed, check the spam quarantine to see whether the lost messages are contained within. If the messages have been mistakenly tagged as spam then we need to implement measures so this does not re-occur. Most spam blockers allow you to open a message which has been mistaken for spam and then click a button (or like) to say the message is not spam. Then the spam blocker will learn that such messages are not spam and should allow them through in future. That said, if you find the spam blocker continues to block those messages you may need to white list the recipients email address. White listing refers to the process of specifying email addresses as known good addresses. Email from any white listed email addresses should pass through the spam blocker and be delivered. As such, only white list emails from known trusted sources to prevent unnecessary messages making it through the spam blocker.

If the messages were not being stopped in the spam blocker, or you do not have a spam blocker installed on your computer, the next aspect you should check is that no message rules have been configured in Outlook Express. Message rules allow you to perform tasks on messages meeting a certain criteria. For example, somehow a message rule may have been configured in Outlook Express which takes all messages from a @hotmail.com email address and deletes them immediately. This would obviously be quite a strange rule to have implemented, but it certainly would explain the behaviour being experienced. To check whether any rules are running, open Outlook Express and go to the “Tools” menu > “Message Rules” > “Mail”. One of two things will happen when you select “Mail”. The first possibility is that a window will appear prompting you to create a new rule. Should this occur, it means that there are no rules currently configured for email. As such, you need not go further and can click the “Cancel” button and the “Cancel” button again to close the blank Message Rules window. However, should a window appear titled “Message Rules” and have some rules listed under “These rules will be applied to Mail messages” then it seems like some rules are running. If you have not defined these yourself, and are unsure of their purpose, I suggest that you disable all the rules by unticking their entries. Once this has been done click OK and then check whether the problem continues. If the problem is resolved, it seems that one of the message rules was the cause of the problem. Even so, you should leave the relevant message rule disabled.

The next possibility is that the messages are being received, but the Outlook Express mail store files have somehow become corrupt. As such, even though the messages are received they are not being displayed due to the corrupt mail store. So long as the mail store has not become excessively corrupt you can usually fix this problem by compacting the mail store files. This removes any deleted messages from the mail store files and does a general tidy and compaction of the data store files. In Outlook Express go to the “File” menu > “Folder” > “Compact All Folders”. Once this is done, restart Outlook Express to check whether you can see the previous messages or at least receive new messages.

Even though we discussed that the problem is not related to your ISP, since it occurred before changing ISPs, there is a possible reason how it might be caused by your ISP. If coincidentally your previous ISP introduced server-side spam filtering, and your new ISP does the same, it is possible that there is a spam filtering solution running on your ISP’s mail server. If the messages which you are being sent are falsely being tagged as spam then you would never see the messages, as they are being filtered at the ISP-level. That said, this is fairly unlikely since server-side spam filtering will generally only reject messages which are definite spam (rather than possible spam) due to the risk of filtering legitimate messages. That said, it may be worthwhile contacting your ISP to determine whether this could be a possible cause of the problem.

Finally, an unlikely (yet plausible) cause of the problem would be if there is another computer somewhere which also has access to your email and is downloading your email messages. Once you download your email from your ISP’s mail server the messages are deleted from the mail server. This means that if you have multiple computers (e.g. a desktop and laptop) and download email on both the email will only be on the computer which was used to download the messages, and the other computer will never see those messages. So, if you have several computers I suggest you disable email downloading on those other computers to prevent the possibility of some email downloading on one computer, and other email downloading on another computer.