This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the September 2021 WYSIWYG newsletter.
Email on Your ISP
by Don VanSyckel
Do you have WOW as your ISP and use email in your WOW account? I do and my wife also. Even if you use a different ISP the ideas below could apply.
My wife and I each run Thunderbird which downloads and and deletes the email in our WOW email inboxes. For this reason I never log into the Wow web site from home, only on travel. Back a week or so ago it became apparent to me that I was not receiving all my emails. My wife had already commented about missing emails and I initially assumed she was doing something strange. But after a while I thought I'd check my email account on WOW. To my surprise there was a lot of email in the "Junk" folder. I, on purpose, have never set up any spam rules at Wow because I mange unwanted emails with Thunderbird "Message Filters". This is easier for me because I'm in my email (Thunderbird) most days and the "Message Filters" are a click away versus logging into Wow. The other advantage to doing these rules in Thunderbird is if I choose to change my ISP provider my Thunderbird email client will move with me and Wow rules would be lost.
I looked all over and finally concluded that Wow (big brother) was "helping" all their customers and running spam filters before email were presented to the customer accounts. There is no way for a customer to turn off Wow's interference with their email. I complained to Wow about this and as of now have not receive a reply to my complaint.
When I clicked on the "Junk" folder to view the emails in it, most to all of the emails were definitely not junk or spam. I selected all the emails and moved them to the "Inbox". I then logged into my wife's email and did the same thing. Unfortunately I did not specifically note the earliest date of emails trapped in "Junk" but it was about the beginning of July. I did this again later that day and sure enough there was more emails in "Junk". While I had the "Junk" folder selected and there was emails in it, I noticed a button "Not Spam". With no emails in "Junk" this button is grayed out as shown below.
Selecting all the emails in "Junk" and clicking the "Not Spam" buttown moved all the emails to the "Inbox" which was a little easier and quicker than my original method.
Not believing that there was no permanent solution to our email issues, I hunted a couple more time for relief to big brother's heavy handed actions. I finally found a solution, though in my opinion, it's a little indirect. When in Wow email you see a "Preferences" tab.
Click "Preferences" and then on the left click "Mail"
Use the drag bar on the right to move down to the "Access from Other Mail Clients" section. Here click the "Incoming Junk Messages" check box.
What this does is when your email client (Thinderbird) checks your Wow inbox, the Wow email server software also provides your email clienvt with the emails, if any, that are in the "Junk" folder.
Initially I ignored the section "Access from Other Mail Clients" because I was not using another email client; I was only using Wow email. This approach works but my "Junk" folder is not another email client; it is a part of my Wow email. It would make more sense to me to include something in the "Receiving Messages" section of "Preferences". What would make things even clearer is put a "Turn off Wow email filters" check box in the "Spam Mail Options" section.
End of Article