legitimate mail from my server is being blocked by Outlook...?

Question

I have a website (kansaspublicradio.org) that has a Contact Us form. The form sends mail to our front desk lady through the email [email protected] (it may be important to note that [email protected] is then forwarded to another email account accessed through Microsoft Outlook), which is also listed on the contact page. That may have been a mistake because now we're getting spam mail.

The front desk lady marked the spam mail in Outlook as spam. Now she is not getting any mail at all from my web server!

I can get mail from the website. Front desk lady can not. I changed the contact form to send directly to her normal email account (the one that [email protected] forwards to) but she doesn't get those either!

Two questions:

1. Do you think the mail is getting blocked by Outlook? The emails are not found in her "junk folder" but I don't know if there's another spam blocker or something.
2. If so, then how can we reverse this? I added "[email protected]" to her list of "safe" addresses to recieve mail from, but it didn't work I guess.

The website is a Drupal cms, with the SMTP Authentication module installed, with SMTP Server setting set to: mail.kansaspublicradio.org

The "from" email address can be anything, but Outlook likely knows the domain name and has blocked that after she labeled enough of them as spam. That's my guess.

Help?

Solution

Outlook likely knows the domain name and has blocked that

1. First check Blocked Senders.

2. Then add the domain from where the email is forwarded from in the Safe Senders.

   • This will prevent the email being blocked in future.

   • You may need to add her "normal email address" here as well as kansaspublicradio.org

Instructions below.

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How to configure junk e-mail filter settings in Outlook?

There are five different junk e-mail filter lists in the Junk E-mail Options that can determine whether the emails will be moved to the junk folder or not.

• Safe Senders List: Email addresses and domain names of the senders in this list are never treated as junk.

• Safe Recipients List: You can add addresses and domain names from the mailing lists and distribution lists to this list so that they will never be marked as spam.

• Blocked Senders List: If you add an email address or domain to this list, messages will automatically sent to the Junk Email folder.

• Blocked Top-Level Domains List: You can add country/region codes to this list to block messages from another country or region.

• Blocked Encodings List: To block messages that contain special encoding or character set, you can add encodings to this list.

To set these junk e-mail filter lists, you can do as follows:

1. Click Home > Junk > Junk E-mail Options in Outlook 2010/2013, and click Actions > Junk E-mail > Junk E-mail Options in Outlook 2007.

2. In the pop up Junk E-mail Options dialog box, click Safe Senders tab, and click Add button to add the address or domain that you don’t want to treat as spams.

   

Source How to configure junk e-mail filter settings in Outlook?

Comments

[David Schwartz]

"The front desk lady marked the spam mail in Outlook as spam. Now she is not getting any mail at all from my web server!" Ouch! That was a huge mistake. Go though all the filtering options and figure out where the block is.

[Dan Mantyla]

Found it! It was in the long list of "Blocked Senders" of course. As it turns out, Outlook was still blocking if even with the from address in the list of Safe Senders, like first it was checking the Blocked Senders and blocking it without checking to see if it was in the Safe Senders firs. So we have it working now, thanks!

[Ramhound]

Outlook cannot block mail. It might move it per a rule to another folder. Outlook is a dumb client and only told what to do. What would block the actual mail would be the server not Outlook. So I 100% disagree with the accepted answer's first sentence

[David Schwartz]

@Ramhound It can silently delete it, which is pretty much the same as blocking.

[Ramhound]

@DavidSchwartz - Which moves it to the Deleted Items folder unread in most cases

[Dan Mantyla]

Except that the email address was also in the Blocked Senders list, as well as in the Safe Senders list. Outlook was still blocking it! Once it was removed from the Block Senders list, emails started getting through again.

[DavidPostill]

Oh. I was just updating my answer to inform you to check there first! ;)

[Dan Mantyla]

ALSO.. the emails were deleted instead of being sent to the junk folder, despite the fact that the checkbox for "delete emails instead of send them to junk folder" was not checked! Stupid microsoft.....

[DavidPostill]

I'm happy it's sorted ;)