Patty Asks Why Her Friend Is Not Receiving Her Email
When I try to send or receive e-mail from a friend in England, the mail is not received by her (or by me from her) and neither of us receives notification that the mail was not sent. Why are we not notified that the mail did not go, and why won't it go? I have no rejected mail to send to my server's "abuse" address because I am never notified that it was rejected. The only way I know she didn't get it, is that she phones to tell me it was not received. Same story if she tries to e-mail me. How can I correct this? Thank you, Patty

Answer
We can sure commiserate with you on this one. Assuming neither one of you have any spam filters installed, it looks like a case of ISP censorship. It's imperative that no one allows their ISP to control their email. At the very least if your ISP has some sort of spam filter installed they should at least allow you to see what email they're calling spam. But many do not, they simply delete it and neither you or your recipient has any clue that you have received the email that was deleted. It's getting to the point of being ludicrous these days with all the ISP subscribing to all sorts of spam filtering services. Even the ISP may not be aware that important emails to their customers are being deleted without any form of notification that anything was deleted.

We said this numerous times and we'll say it again: Email addressed to you belongs to you. It does not belong to your ISP anymore than letters you send by regular mail belong to the post office. It is not the post office's job to decide what mail is "good" and what mail is "bad". Their job is to deliver the mail. The same with an ISP. To say that an ISP who deletes mail they think you don't want is a service is asinine. It's not a service; it's censorship. If someone takes control of your personal property how can that be a good thing? We would rather receive 100 spam emails and remove them ourselves and not take a chance on missing an important email that we would turn over control of our email to some third party we don't even know. It seems like a no-brainer to us. But still, many hang on the idea that ISPs who censor (filter) email are somehow providing a valuable service. How anyone can view restrictions on their personal rights as a benefit escapes us.

There is not a week that goes by that we don't get a dozen or more irate emails from subscribers who have paid to receive InfoAve Premium but did not receive their newsletter because their ISP simply censored and deleted it. They get angry with us, thinking we didn't send it. We show them proof their ISP rejected it and still they're upset with us because their ISP tells them they didn't reject it despite us showing proof they did.

All I can tell you to do is call your ISP and object as strongly as you can to their censorship of your personal email. If they won't remove their filters or censorship, your only choices are to get another email address (like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc) and use it, or get another ISP.