I just got done helping a user with why no one could send her email. She complained that she wasn’t receiving email and nothing was bouncing back to the senders. My first thought went to the spam filter. Of course, she had never bothered to set it up even though that was an IT requirement. We went through configuring her spam filter and the 1k+ spam emails that she’s received in the last few weeks but didn’t see any of the missing (real) emails.
Before I go further, I need to make this disclaimer: I’m an idiot. My first inclination should have been to assume that the user is the idiot. Instead, it was my second inclination. I shouldn’t have bothered with the spam filter. I should have just assumed that she didn’t know how to use her email client. Whenever I give a user the benefit of a doubt, I’m almost always wrong.
And so we launcher her email client. Sure enough, everything looked like it should except for one thing. She wasn’t sorting her emails by date. The emails that were shown were in chronological order, but date ordering was secondary. And since she never deleted any messages, the several hundred in her inbox prohibited her from actually seeing the new ones in the sea of unread old ones. Sure, she could have used the search feature, but let’s start slow. As soon as I clicked the header to sort the emails by date, her missing emails from this week suddenly appeared!
Now, I have to love people like this. They are what give me a job. Sorting emails is like magic. Now she can see the date for her daughter’s recital and emails from church. She’s every so thankful that I “fixed” her email. I’m consoling myself that I didn’t have to waste 30 minutes explaining spam filtering, but at least it’s set up.
