In 2016 more than half of all email messages sent and received on Earth are spam, and a good proportion of these messages contain links to ‘booby-trapped’ websites or they carry virus-infected payloads. Personally I get over 200 pieces of junk mail every day.

As internet service providers and email reader publishers scramble to try to shield their customers from spam, sometimes they mislabel legitimate items as spam. This is completely understandable because they can’t understand what is being sent and unless you’ve previously written to the sender before, or better yet, have the sender’s name in your address book, they have no way of knowing that there’s a legitimate reason for a particular message to have been sent to you. Remember too that spam can be as subjective as beauty – it is seen ‘in the eye of the beholder’ – if I sent a bunch of messages about FLAME to folks who had no interest in it they could very legitimately regard it as spam.

If there was a reliable way to have a message universally be marked as NOT spam, every spammer out there would use it!

Teaching your email program that messages sent by a particular person or organisation (and remember that spammers often LIE about their own identity…) varies from email program to email program. I use Outlook 2010 and in that program one may right-click on a message inside your Junk E-mail folder and manually mark it as ‘Not Junk’.

If I did this in the example above, I’d be getting a lot more messages from that sender.

If you have a message from Flame that is marked as ‘spam’, use this technique to avoid that classification in future.

Ideally, also add Flame Toronto toronto@flameconference.ca to your address book to indicate to your email program that you have a legitimate ongoing relationship with Flame.