Recently we have had reports of members with Shaw email addresses not receiving emails from our Gmail account, particularly emails describing upcoming birding events. It is unclear why this is happening but here are some hints that may stop it from happening.

Sorry about the technical detail.

Email sent to you is received by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Among the services the ISP provides is spam/junk filtering. Suspicious messages are put into a separate folder, usually named Junk or perhaps Spam. When you read your email, you have two choices: log in to your ISP and view the email there or run a mail app on your computer and it will download and allow you to view your email. In the second case, you may not see the email the ISP has characterized as junk/spam.

In the first case, you will be able to see the Junk folder and will be able to open it BUT DON”T READ THE EMAILS. Identify the emails which are not junk/spam, show they are okay to deliver (the method depends on the ISP) and they are moved to your inbox. You may want to delete the other junk/spam messages.

In the second case (where you use a mail program on your computer; possible names are Thunderbird, Outlook, and Mail) the junk/spam messages will not be downloaded to your computer so you will have to log in to your ISP to find them. What follows are the directions for a Shaw mail account.

Log in to webmail.shaw.ca. You will need to enter your email address and password; you have provided these to your mail program in the past but, since you are not using your mail program at the moment, you need to provide them.

You will see the emails in your inbox (probably none since they have been downloaded) in the centre of the screen and a list of folders on the left side of the screen. One of those folders is Junk. Click Junk and a list of the files in that folder appears; as I write this post all five messages in Junk are not actually junk!

There is a checkbox beside each email. For those which are NOT junk, click the checkbox and then click the button labelled Not Spam. The messages will move to your inbox on the ISP and will eventually be downloaded by your mail program.

I expect the remaining emails will be junk, trying to sell you something you neither want nor need. If there are any such emails, note the checkbox beside the column headings From and Subject. Click it and all the messages will be chosen. Click the button labelled Delete and they are gone.

I wish that were all that you have to do, but you should try to prevent the problem happening in the future. That requires modifying your Preferences.

Click the button labelled Preferences. In the menu that appears, choose Mail. Scroll down to the section labelled Spam Mail Options. On the right side of the screen is a section labelled Allow Messages From. To give CONC’s email messages a chance, add concnewsletter@gmail.com to that list. Repeat for other addresses that ended up in Junk. When you have finished entering addresses, click the Save button at the top left of the screen.

Not quite finished!

Click Preferences again and choose Trusted Addresses. Add concnewsletter@gmail.com to the list and click Save. Click Sign Out.

That’s it, as far as we know, but even with these preferences set, you may still find a few CONC emails classified as junk. Suggestion: check the Junk folder occasionally, particularly Sunday and Wednesday if you have not received notice of the trip for the following day.