Did someone ever send you an EMail and you can not find it?  It is like you simply never got it?

You know for sure someone sent it to you.  Do you ever wonder where it went?

You verified your EMail address with the sender and yet you never got the EMail!

This certainly can be frustrating. But make a decision to not let it stress you out. Simply get some help.

We have identified a problem in the industry.  Salespeople are not getting all their email.

When this happens you have to be like a detective to figure out what happened.

It may have gone to a Spam Folder in your EMail program.

This is separate from junk mail or trash.

I will use one example.

ICIWorld provides an EMail List Service that delivers new listings to members and the public.

People can subscribe by themselves to receive EMail of new listings.

There are 20,000 +/- EMails delivering new Haves and Wants daily to individual subscribers.

People are doing deals and setting showings right from the daily emails.

So when a member or a buyer, seller or member of ICIWorld is not receiving their email they are rightly concerned.

With our daily webinar workshops one on one with members we looked at their email and in this case they were using Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Mail was putting the mail from ICIWorld into a Spam Folder.  But it was not easy to find. The list of EMail folders was tricky to use.  You click on more to see more and it shows some not all.  Then you had to use the extra scroll bar but when you moved to it, the items in the “more area” no longer showed up.  After a few tries and some digging finally the spam folder showed up.  And boy what a surprise to our member!  Not only was the EMail from ICIWorld of new listings that our member subscribed to there, but so was other legitimate email!!

We are finding that todays spam blockers are blocking legitimate email big time.

Over the past recent months, brokers are amazed to find so many legitimate emails that are trapped by a spam blocker that they have never checked.

Not only was this a problem but there was another serious problem.

When the member placed his Want on ICIWorld the listing gives the ability for the public to reply.

He wanted a piece of land, and an owner of a property who had a piece of land replied to the Want by EMail and the EMail was trapped in the spam blocker that the member had no idea it was there.

This can easily result in missing a deal and the member would not know it.

So here we have a breakdown by the very important tool of EMail.

If you do not check your Spam Blocker regularly you can easily be missing legitimate mail from any source, family, business, etc.

Now when we checked his spam folder there was a Mr. Hinton in there from London, England, a lawyer a Nigerian Scam letter. Now our member knows a lawyer in his town, Mr. Hinton.  It was not the same. How can one learn about the security issues of the Internet? See Security but more on that another time. That could take a weekend of learning.

Whew . . .

It is like a mine field.

It is like you have to tip toe through the spam blocker and identify the proper email that is legitimate, put a check mark and then click on NOT SPAM. All email programs have various renditions of this.

But the other problem our member had was there was no choice to click on NOT SPAM.  The new version of Yahoo Mail simply does not have it as of Aug 30, 2013 at 2pm. So we switched back to the classic view and there it was.  This was almost an hour figuring all this out. (as of Aug 31 6am it now shows up in the new version of Yahoo Mail)

In addition Internet service providers have spam blockers and you may need to check there.  Many people are simply not aware that their Internet Service Provider is, with good intentions, blocking what they think is spam mail.

Their thinking is, it is better to block what they think spam mail is and accidentally trap legitimate mail, than to not have a spam blocker.

It think they should remind people that they should check their spam blocker once in a while and give people the choice to click on “not spam” or another term is “white list” This will allow the particular EMail to go to your inbox properly.

This is all “driving on the information highway” much like learning to drive a car.

There is a learning curve. Safety and security is at play on the Internet as well.

Gary Nusca, CCIM
ICIWorld.net, Inc.
416-214-4875