Some Livingsoft customers have complained that they were not receiving emails from Livingsoft that they had been expecting. On several occasions, we found that the emails had been sent, but were not received. At least in some cases, the cause appears to be the rather aggressive spam filters that AOL now uses. It can sometimes catch emails that you want as well as those that you wish to avoid.

To find out if AOL is stopping emails that you do want, you first need to look at what is being filtered. The following illustrations are from AOL 9.0. If you use an earlier version of AOL, you may need to look elsewhere for the same information.

When you have your "New" mail displayed, look for the link beneath it referring to "Spam Controls" as shown here:

Click on that to open your spam control window. The first thing you need to do is see if you have AOL's Advanced Spam Filter enabled. If it is, that means that AOL is treating some amount of your email as spam and is counting on you to train it to know what should be considered spam and what should not. If you have not been doing the training, then it may be catching more email than you want it to.

So, first you need to see what it is treating as spam. Look for the "Blocked mail should be:"  selector (bottom left of this window) and set it to deliver your blocked mail to your spam folder so you can monitor what is being filtered for a bit. Now, for the next week or so, watch that link at the bottom left of your "New" mail window that is labeled "Spam Folder" (see above, just below the "Read" button). Whenever there is anything in there, click on that link and see what it is.

This is what you see when your spam folder is opened (illustration below). If it really is all garbage, just delete it. But, if you see anything at all in there that should not be treated as spam (such as emails from Livingsoft), click on that button labeled "This is not Spam". That will instruct AOL's spam filters to recognize that email as legitimate and that you want it delivered and not intercepted. If you do this process for awhile, AOL's Advanced Spam Filter will learn what you want and deliver it accordingly. If you use the Advanced Spam Filter, you MUST train it to get good results.

We hope this process will help insure that the emails you are expecting from Livingsoft do actually reach you. Best wishes....

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