# Here's a Likely Reason Why a Company Might Not Be Responding to Your Emails



## Mike Greene

We get a lot of threads where people complain that they haven't gotten a response to their emails. Usually these companies are known to be good at responding, so what's up with them not responding to you? Here is a likely cause:

Somewhere around 2% of our Realitone support responses get blocked by people's email servers, even before going to your spam folder. In other words, you can't see them even if you try, since your email server may have zapped them before they could even get to your spam folder. It's really annoying, but some email servers subscribe to blacklist services which are very aggressive. This is especially true if your email address uses your website as its domain. There are hundreds of these blacklist services and it's impossible to keep up with them all.

So if you're not getting a response, I would recommend trying an alternate way of getting in touch, like through Facebook, or if they have a chat feature, or through some other alternate means. Or better yet, email them using a different email address from a different email domain. Maybe use your spouse's or friend's account if you don't have an alternate account yourself.

Another suggestion is to email again, and clarify that you didn't get a response the first time. That way we know there may be an issue, so if the issue persists, we can try alternate means from our end and start the _"Can you hear me now?"_ game.


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## chillbot

This happens a lot with my stupid pacbell.net email address. Which you used to have Mike? And maybe Nick too? But gmail always goes through. I really should switch it over but 20+ years with the same email...

8dio & Ilya Efimov are two that absolutely can't get an email through to my pacbell.net address for whatever reason.

EDIT: Yup I see this was brought up in an 8dio thread already.


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## funnybear

A lot of small businesses do not bother or do not know how to properly configure their outgoing email servers. This also applies for hosted email services where the default configuration often requires additional config to setup the sending domain credentials properly.

SPF/DKIM/DMARC are the key terms here and are unfortunately a bit complex for non technically minded folks to configure. But when it comes to email deliverability, the effort to set this up properly is worth it for sure.

Once set up correctly, use a validation service that actually checks your email config for SPF/DKIM/DMARC compliance and will raise red flags if something is not configured properly.


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## Mike Greene

chillbot said:


> This happens a lot with my stupid pacbell.net email address. Which you used to have Mike? And maybe Nick too? But gmail always goes through. I really should switch it over but 20+ years with the same email...


At the risk of derailing my own thread ... I hear you! I finally had enough of the problems, though (I almost called you to see if you had some solutions), and made the switch a few months ago. It's less painful than I expected, and in hindsight, I should have done this years ago.

I'm still keeping the Pacbell account and I check it once every day or so, but I moved all the important stuff to my shiny new Yahoo account, which is now a lean, mean efficient account. I left the less important stuff on the PacBell account, so that's basically my semi-junk folder now. (Mostly developers, who I don't necessarily want to unsubscribe from.) PacBell will still get the occasional email from a cousin or something, so I just give them the new Yahoo address.

What's unexpectedly cool about this is that since almost everything in the PacBell account is unimportant, I can delete the entire day all at once with the Yahoo app. (The iPhone Mail app stopped working with my PacBell account, so I had to shift to the Yahoo app for it.) I like it much better this way, where the daily EastWest or CineSamples _"Only 29 days left in this month's 60% Off Sale!!!"_ emails are all in one account, and the important stuff is in my new account.


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## chillbot

You're right I should probably switch. No reason I can't keep pacbell for a few years as I slowly phase it out. It's just daunting thinking of the thousand or so websites that I login with using pacbell.

But the flip side is there's nothing more aggravating than trying to use the "I forgot my password" link and they respond with "ok! check your email" and then you wait... and wait... and nothing.


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## MartinH.

I have a an old gmx mail account set to auto forward all mails to my actual account. I don't even know the password to the old account anymore, but I still get all the mail that is being sent there. Some services will eventually delete your account though if you no longer actively log in.


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## Technostica

Also related to email, I highly recommend not using Outlook.com email addresses.
They use a ridiculously aggressive spam filter that can’t be turned off.
Its failure rate for me is around 99%, in the sense that that percentage of mail in my spam folders doesn’t belong there.
So I have to login to each of my 4 accounts on the web every weekend to check the spam folders.
Or is there a way to avoid having to do this?

The irony is that I use the Outlook email client in Office 365 to manage my emails on my desktop.
So I am paying to use their client software but they refuse to send all my emails to me.
I assume that they want you to login so they can shovel ads and news at you.
Odious company.


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## PaulieDC

I even had trouble with my own domain for my photo business including a friend of mine who hosts his own email on RackSpace, and now when I send to him, it eventually gets rejected by his server like you said. Bizarre. Then it happened again with someone else, and it's just "paul" at my domain. So I switched to a Gmail account a few years back, never an issue. Funny we used to laugh (still do) at aol.com and yahoo.com email addresses, but Gmail seems to have cred over all the others and I never hit a server wall. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


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