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.