Email Management

At first, spam was an annoyance, but when spammers started using email to send malicious viruses, email services had to turn up the spam filters.

If you have sent an email to us and didn't get a response (usually within 24 hours if not much sooner) here's one of the many possible reasons:

As you can see, there's a very good possibility that what appears to be a non response from us to your email is often a matter of not having received your email or you not having received our reply. We respond to every email that we receive.

If you don't have a response from us to your email within 24 hours please resend your message to bcss at mm.st and bcss.support at mm.st, preferably using a different email service. Go to Gmail (the better of the free email services) and set up a backup account for such purposes.

Free email services like AOL, Gmail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! are not suited for business purposes because they have limited resources and functionality. To keep costs down they limit file sizes, often block file attachments and go way overboard on classifying emails as spam. Please don't use them for your business. Instead, contact your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and ask them to show you how to use your ISP email account.

One of the ways software blocks emails is to block emails containing specific words or phrases. It's possible to receive several emails from a source but have one email blocked because it contained a 'poison word'.

Also, spam-blocking programs are 'heuristic' in that they (hopefully) 'learn' what is spam and what is not spam by analyzing received email messages. A sender of several emails could end up being blocked if the sender acquires enough 'points for spamming' when the sender is not a spammer. Spam filters are very dangerous. Please always check your Spam Box before deleting messages from it. Spam filters are far from 'perfect'.

If an email makes it past your ISP and your Firewall and your Virus-Protection Program, it still needs to pass muster with your Email Program's Spam Filters. (Free email services have overly-aggressive spam filters. Check with yours to see if you can control the level of spam filtering.)

If you make the settings below in your email program and are still having problems with blocked emails, contact your ISP to see if messages are being blocked there, or investigate your firewall or spam program (if any).

It is no long sufficient to add an email address to your address book to prevent messages from that email address from being blocked.

These days it is necessary to add email addresses and/or domain names to your email program's Safe Sender List (Allowed Sender List, White List) to try to prevent emails from those email addresses and domains from being blocked. Doing this also does not guarantee that every attempted email communication will be successful.

The following instructions are for Microsoft Outlook (Office 2007). Your views of your email-program screens will look different if you are not using this version of Outlook, but the general principles are similar:

In Outlook, click on Tools:
Click on Options:
On the Preferences tab, to the right of 'E-mail', click Junk E-mail.
Click the Safe Senders tab.
Click Add and enter mm.st and click OK.
Click OK and OK again to close out the Options Screen.

Select 'Also trust e-mail from my Contacts check box' for all your Contacts to be Safe Senders.

By default pictures (images) in emails are blocked. Images in messages from or to Safe Senders and Safe Recipients will be allowed.

A .txt list of names and addresses may be imported. See Outlook Help for instructions.

Right-click on any message then click Add Sender to Safe Senders List or Add Sender's Domain to Safe Senders List.