Email down
Is there an email outage tonight? It started at 1am. Can't access webmail or pop3 on phone or pc.
Forum Discussion
Webmail appears close to being restored, but a couple of issues were noted.
Webmail from Outlook, with an email address in the body, is marked --SPAM-- in the subject, but doesn't actually go to the Spam folder because "No Spam filtering" is selected.
However, Webmail from Outlook without an email address in the body and Webmail from Gmail with or without an email address in the body are not marked --SPAM-- in the subject.
The recent Webmail maintenance may have broken Spam filtering. Webmail is interpreting email addresses contained in the body of a message sent from Outlook as Spam.
The indicated time received was one hour later than the actual time email was received. Apparently, the recent maintenance changed the time zone in basic settings. Changing it back to the correct time zone corrected that issue.
Webmail from an Outlook sender will be flagged with --SPAM-- in front of the subject if the Webmail username is located anywhere within the body of the message. It doesn't have to be in an email address. It can be part of a larger word. If someone's username is any contiguous part of a commonly used word, a lot of their email from senders who use Outlook could be incorrectly flagged as spam. This appears to be an error caused by coding that doesn't properly account for something unique about Outlook message source. If Cox and their provider had actually meant to do it, why isn't this spam filter applied to email from all email providers?
will be flagged with --SPAM-- in front of the subject if the Webmail username is located anywhere within the body of the message
Can you confirm if this is a new change or just something you have now discovered? Might explain why people's email have been marked as spam over the years.
Remember in your post on Pro Tips about pinging and mentioning other users in the Forum? Microsoft added this feature to Outlook in 2016. In the body of your message, if you type an "@" in front of a username, presumably in your Address Book, Outlook will add the username to the To field.
Although the composer of the message may not type an "@" before a username in the body of the message, Outlook may be adding a preparatory tag or command to the username, such as "I recognize this username," and the server may not like the tag. Just a guess.
I can't confirm this is a new change. It's something I noticed while testing during the recent email maintenance. I first thought email was flagged as spam if the message contained an email address. I only noticed yesterday that it happens if just the Webmail username is anywhere in the message body.
If someone with email address stan@cox.net received Webmail from someone using Outlook that just says "Please reply the instant you receive this.", it would be flagged as spam.
This is a new discovery made with limited resources. There's one variable I can't readily test. I use the same username for both Outlook and Webmail. If the developer didn't account for that, it could confuse their code. To properly test this, an Outlook user needs to send an email to a Webmail user with a different username and include the Webmail username in the body.
