In my company’s CRM system, once labeled as bounced, we have to delete the CRM entry and start all over. It is easier to use another email address that hasn’t be bounced back as spam.
What program are you using to hit the spam button? Are you using Apple Mail? Are you accessing Comcast’s webmail page using a browser? Something else?
@josehill I use a Comcast email App on my iPad. It has a Spam button. I select what goes into that folder, other than a few filter rules. (The rules are for certain prolific spam email addresses …)
@MaltbyEarl I don’t have another email address, just the Comcast one. Your point about deleting my email and starting over is what I was trying to convey to the USPS “help” person.
(What does CRM stand for?)
Depending on the sender and the relationship between them and Comcast, marking as spam is basically synomymous with a bounce. It’s actually a complaint that Comcast sends through the “Feedback Loop” to the sender, who then reacts to the report by doing something suitably drastic, like unsubscribing you and/or blacklisting your email address. Basically you should think of that mark spam button as equivalent to “intentionally cause this message to fail delivery”. It should be clear why you’re having trouble getting your email now.
I don’t like feedback loops. They’re nothing but trouble. If you want to report abuse, please do it properly, either manually or with help from the likes of Spamcop, but not automatically using an all-too-easy interface in a mailbox provider’s app. (Google, it will be noted, provides feedback only to those who ask for it by using their Postmaster Tools service; they don’t send reports.)
Right, it sounds to me as if the Comcast app is also possibly sending an unsubscribe (if there is one in the email) to the sender if you mark as spam.
I’d consider switching to the stock Apple Mail app for email with this account. (Though I suppose marking as spam accidentally may do the same thing with the Comcast email account on the server-side, but marking a message as spam with the stock Mail app is not something you would do accidentally.)
As for another email address, you can get a free gmail account from google with not much effort if nothing else changes.
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CRM stands for Customer Records Management. It is where my company keeps our 30k email address of people who want to hear from us. If an “unsubscribe” or “bounced as spam” event happens, it locks that email address so we can’t send to it ever again for that contact.
Also, it wasn’t delete the email, it is deleting the entire contact record in their CRM. All you history with the company gone. Hard call.
@Sebby Maybe I am not being clear. 95% off the time, I know what i am designating as spam —- and it IS spam. Most of it comes from people who have bought spam lists. Today alone, I received 7 emails with the subject “iCloud Alert” or close to that. Each of those 7 emails had a different sender.
I don’t intentionally put “good” email in the spam folder. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the email is legitimate or spam. When that is the case, I just put it in trash. I have OsteoArhrits and crooked fingers. .Also the Trash and Spam buttons are close together. So inadvertently, good email finds it way into spam.
My problem still exists —- getting USPS Informed Delivery to re-instate my email. You write a very good description on what happens to email marked as spam. With your permission, I am going to copy it and send to the USPS help.
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@ddmiller Apple mail doesn’t play on some of the computers I use. Comcast works on all of them, my iPad and iPhone.
Does it work on that iPad?
You can use different email apps on different computers. If the account is IMAP (which I’m sure the Mail app would be with a Comcast Mail acct on iPadOS), any deletions, reading of messages, marking as junk, etc., will sync across to the Comcast Mail app, to any Mail app on iOS and macOS, etc.
More problems with legitimate mail being bounced. A few weeks back my web hosting server, Siteground, dumped the company that had been providing spam filtering for a home-grown spam filter. I’m fussy about about legitimate mail getting spam-filtered after some past problems, so I checked the first day and a day later called them to ask how I could identify email as good. They said I needed to go into their web mail and transfer the good mail marked spam into the IN folder, or I could dig a ways deeper to whitelist the domain the mail came from. Neither works for mail from one magazine I used to write for. Moving mail from a few others – including Smithsonian – which I have yet to try whitelisting. I tried contacting the magazine I used to write for, but they never responded. I suspect the companies that I can’t unblock are doing funny in mailing list management. It’s a pain, and trying to fix it will require another couple hours on chat trying to get the problem through to the otherwise good help line.
I use Apple Mail to download email from my domain’s webmail, Gmail, and Apple, and if the system is working smoothly I never have to look at webmail, which I find cumbersome. Verizon provides my Internet but its email is so awful I have it set to forward everything to a gmail account. I wonder if the problems come from my web hosting firm thinking they could slap together some AI to handle spam?
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Jane, a crazy idea to get USPS Informed Delivery to get you going again. You may want to use Mailinator (public inbox in the header) to set up a temporary email address. Something like GETUSPS@ mailinator.com. Once that is set up, switch USPS back to the Comcast email address. It could be that if you initiate the change, it will come back. I just had to do that with my Bill Pay system which bounced my preferred email address.
Mailinator’s public email address allows you to create any @mailinator.com. You can then check the email at the public inbox. Just type you name you chose in the upper right box and hit go to see that inbox.
@MaltbyEarl that is an interesting idea. I have never heard of that program andit’s worth a try.
hmmmm I wonder if Apple’s “hide my email” would work??
I sent a lengthy response to the help email I received from USPS Informed Delivery, but have not had a response. They considered my problem “resolved” with no resolution!
Jane
It may. The idea is to on USPS to change it to something else for a little bit (if you can actually capture the “hide my email” address, you are better than I!) and then turn it to the one you want. I often give it overnight as my history is of overnight batch jobs on computers doing things.
If you think my explanation would be helpful, then of course you can share it. It is probably fairly well understood by most email postmasters and postmistresses though, I expect, even those who have finally thrown in the towel and outsourced all their email delivery issues to one of the big providers who take care of this sort of thing for them.
I think @Ace is right, you probably should think about alternative clients that don’t expose you to the vulnerability of accidentally marking email as spam. If it were easily correctable then sure, convenience and preference, but in this case it seems to be causing you to lose good mail and it’s a much harder process to remedy the situation. You can still have a pick of many email clients using Comcast on any device using IMAP, or maybe you can forward your Comcast email elsewhere and use another service (Gmail, for example) from their own apps. Although I like the idea of using different email addresses for different services, I wouldn’t rely on that for getting companies to reset your email receiving preferences, since it might not be about just your email address. But it’s a good idea anyway and a good start, so you could try any of the various free services, or better, if you have iCloud Plus, you have the excellent “Hide my Email” feature, which I can attest to.
What is the process for training Spamsieve from your iPhone or iPad?
There is more info here: SpamSieve Manual: Setting Up a Spam Filtering Drone
But basically each mail account has a TrainSpam and TrainGood folder (so far I haven’t used the good folder). If I receive a spam message in my in box, I move the message to the trainspam folder for that account from the Mail app. If there was ever anything in junk that shouldn’t have been marked junk, then I would move those messages to the traingood folder.
I have a Mac mini at home that checks mail every minute, and, as I understand it, spamsieve uses the scripts to read through the trainspam and traingood folders to train the junk filter, and (I believe) moves the messages from trainspam to junk and from traingood to the in box.
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I finally talked with my ISP (SiteGround) about legitimate email being bounced, and learned some interesting things that may help other people who run into similar problems.
The immediate issue was a major science journal that I subscribe to in PDF form that looks exactly like the print version. When I look at the sending address, I see the journal’s normal mailing address, but when I found it in the spam folder, I whitelisted that address, and forwarding it to my In box, both of which should cause whitelisting, the next PDF copy of the magazine also bounced. The ISP tech checked and found the email they were receiving did not come from the magazine’s domain, but from http://cambeywest.com/ which apparently is a mailing service, which is what needs to be whitelisted. I have done that and will report what happens.
The same spam queue included and email from TidBits, which had tidbits.com in the “from” box, which I had earlier tried to whitelist. It’s possible that I had bungled my earlier attempt to whitelist TidBits – my ISP offers a number of ways to do it. But I wanted to mention that because the mailing service appears to be sending from an address the recipient does not see but which the receiving server does see – and could use it to block legitimate mail as spam. I have now whitelisted TidBits in the recommended way, and am hoping that will work, but will keep an eye on it.
I am not a software expert (I was trained in engineering but have been a science and technology journalist for decades), but it looks like something is going on that can screw up email seriously, and wanted to pass what I know along to help others who understand this better.
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I have done the same for many years and this is how it works. During a year there might be 2 or 3 false negatives. Moving them to the traingood folder moves them to the In folder.
We used Siteground for email for about 18 months. My experience was poor. We got blacklisted as one of their server addresses had been recycled from a known spammer, we regularly had issues with mail not arriving (or not being sent) and I found their support less than stellar.
In frustration we moved to Exchange and whilst it’s a complex beast, it’s been pretty solid.