Mail.com Redirection and Spam

It happened so that I use mail.com premium redirection service for my emails. (When I started using it it wasn't premium, and it wasn't mail.com either. It was Altavista – does anyone remember this word? - giving out “permanent personal email addresses for life”.) The service works slowly, but it used to work more or less stable – and I am too lazy to change my primary email address in gazillion places.

Recently, however, I started getting complaints from my correspondents. They told me that my mailbox bounces their emails. I also started to notice that I am missing some emails. I tried reaching customer service – they told me that everything is all right, yes, everything's fine, and I couldn't reproduce the effect.

Yesterday, when my wife told me that she got her mails bounced, I got really angry. I asked her for the error, she showed me the bounced letter, and then I understood what happened. I logged on to my mail.com account – which I usually never do, because, as I said, I am using them only as redirector – and discovered that they turned on spam protection.

I definitely didn't ask for it, and I don't remember them telling me about it (though I could have overlooked the notice). Which is worse, the setting were totally absurd – caught spam was stored in a “Junk e-mail” folder on the server, so I had no clue that some messages were sorted out. (They could have tag them as spam, or, at least, send me once a day a reminder that such and such messages were put into Junk folder – their system knows that I use it only as redirector!).

I turned their spam protection off, and I hope it will fix my problems. So, just a word of advice – if you are using mail.com premium redirector, go to the server and check the settings – it might save you from some unpleasant surprises later.