Are you kidding me??
For the past few days, one of my customers has been reporting that some of the email she was sending out were not recieve by the recipients. Furthermore, if she forwareded the original message that didn’t go through on first attempt, it would go through as reliably as ever on second try. Now the more I learn about email and will everyone using some sort of spam filter, I’m really surprised that email ever works. But it usually works, and fairly well considering how many things have to work perfect for a message to go from my inbox to yours. So when a customer says that their emails are getting to the intended recipients, it’s my job to figure out why. And you will never guess what the problem was…. A blank subject line. All of the messages that didn’t go through on the first attempt had blank subject lines. When she forwarded the messages, “FWD” was automatically added in the subject. Turns out there is a setting in Symantec Antivirus for Microsoft Exchange which I had forgotten about, that if enabled will ‘drop’ emails (at one time this was indicative of spam or virus infected message). ARGH!
So the moral of the story is to include a something in the subject line of all your emails (and yes I have since disabled this restriction)…