Anyway

When I’m trav­el­ling I run my per­sonal email through my Gmail account, so I have a bet­ter web browser inter­face than the one my ISP provides. Lots of people told me about how good the spam fil­ter is; I tend to find too many false pos­it­ives (admit­tedly, most from mail­ing list sub­scrip­tions) so I check my spam folder reg­u­larly. I was puzzled as to why many of Tim’s emails to me ended up in spam , and in par­tic­u­lar those to the soc­cer team our son is on. If you’re send­ing email to a num­ber of people, some of whom may use Gmail (even if their email address isn’t Gmail, they still might use it as I do, or their com­pany may use Gmail for mail), or if you use Gmail your­self, you need to be aware of this problem.

Google has a help page on the topic and it turns out there are two solu­tions. If you’re on the receiv­ing end, you can set up a fil­ter to whitel­ist a par­tic­u­lar email address. If you’re send­ing the emails, make sure the To: header doesn’t match the From: header. This can cause a prob­lem with some dis­tri­bu­tion list sys­tems where you put your own email address in the To: header to obscure the email addresses you’re send­ing the mes­sage to; if you need to do this it’s prob­ably a good idea to get a Gmail account if you don’t already have one and try things out.