That's happened to me too, it drives me nuts. I had one that expected me to go through that whole "identify yourself" or we won't send your email through. I didn't waste my time identifying myself. If some one cares enough to send an email, add us to your contacts, so the email goes through.

Yep, I hate that too! If that person initiates the exchange, that person should have enough consideration to pre-admit the person she's writing to.

I can see how that would be annoying. However, many people do not understand the way spam filters work, and may not even be aware that their ISP filters spam. Also, if someone initiates an email to you from the GardenWeb site, they don't know what email address it's going to, unless you've made your address public (and I don't think most people do), so they can't add you to their address book.

If I didn't know how to look in my spam folder, this would happen to people I've emailed from the forum. As susanfnp says, you don't know the address so you can't add it when you write. My ISP automatically filters out anything from an unknown source, even when I initiated the contact. I look in my spam folder several times a day and have found many emails from forum members and some of my replies in there (don't be afraid to email me - I find them fast!). My dh doesn't ever check his spam folder so don't write to him :)

Yeah, I understand that of course they don't know my email address when contacting me through gardenweb. So, I don't really know the solution. And really, I don't mind getting emails asking me about my kitchen -- it's flattering of course. And I always do try to respond right away.

It's basically this "identify yourself" process that momj47 mentioned. I'm just not going to go through that. What's the answer?

I guess my suggestion is for the emailer to make sure his/her email contact is available through gardenweb, then ask me to answer through that, and then make sure gardenweb is an acceptable sender for the spam filter.

IOW, the sender should go to the effort to make sure it's easy for the person replying to get through, not the other way around.

Wow! I didn't even know this might happen. I just delete the contents of spam bucket without looking. Now maybe I'll look?!!

This has happened to me, but remember also that much of it does get through. Every time I got a spam warning from replying to a member, they have replied back. I agree, people just don't know how to set them up and often it is in a "safe" folder or something like that.

I know I can set up my email accounts with Outlook so that any email that comes from the Gardenweb immediately goes into the Gardenweb folder. Outlook knows that any email from Gardenweb is not spam.

For a lot of email programs, you can make rules that allow mail from certain people or certain email addresses to come through and not be regarded as spam.

I must say, it's always exciting to have new mail in the Gardenweb folder.