Missing e-mails

I would be very suspicious of e-mails from a financial institution asking to verify or provide a new e-mail address.  That sounds more like a phishing scheme than legit e-mail. Anyway, if you are positive you are missing legit e-mails, they may be blocked the Cox's spam filter .....

What are your spam filter settings.  Log into webmail then select Settings.  From there select SpamBlocker Settings.  The first option will immediately delete any incoming message detected as spam without notification, don't select it.  Use either of the other selections, that will allow you to see messages marked as spam and take action.  But again, caution, only act on e-mails you know are legitimate.  If in doubt, call the financial institution on a know phone number and verify.

AllenP, thanks for your reply.

Like you, I am very cautious when receiving such e-mails. In this case, they were legit as they merely referenced a secure e-mail that was waiting for me after I logged in to their web site, and no I never click a link provided in the e-mail. I only go to the web site I've bookmarked. Actually, when I logged in to that web site, I was immediately asked to either confirm my e-mail address of record, or provide a new one.

As to the spam settings, I will give that a try and see if that fixes the problem. It may take awhile to determine whether that fixes it, since I will have to wait until a legit e-mail shows up as suspected spam. If it does, it will demonstrate that Cox has too tight a filter.

One question I don't know the answer to is whether a filter may have dropped the e-mail along the way before it got to Cox.

Becky, there was nothing in my Spam folder for WebMail. My original spam setting was to delete all spam. I've now changed it to tag spam and receive it into my inbox.

Upon setting spam preferences to tag and receive, I found almost immediately that I got a note that was tagged spam, but was not. So, that tells me the Cox spam filter incorrectly tags legitimate mail as spam. I understand that all spam filters are based on heuristic algorithms, and some are better than others. It's not an easy task. From this experience, I can no longer trust the Cox spam filter to judge my mail for spam.

This raises the next question: for mail that the Cox spam filter determines to be spam, and if my spam filter was set to delete such mail, is that mail merely deleted at the Cox server, or is it bounced back to the sender? This is very important. If it is bounced back to the sender, that would explain why I've gotten the occasional notice from senders claiming they have not been able to send me mail and to confirm my e-mail address. If such tagged mail is not bounced back to the sender by the Cox server, what is causing some of my mail to be bounced?

Since I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client, I can use a filter to separate spam tagged notes into a special spam folder. That will help manage it for me.

Chris, thanks for your reply. I've done exactly as you've suggested. I discovered that most of the notes tagged as spam are, in fact, not. I'm forwarding those legitimate notes to ThisIsNotSpam@cox.net in the hope that will help the folks there improve their algorithms.

Yes, that's the way I've always sent spam reports, too.

Since I've changed my spam policy to allow SPAM tagged e-mail to come to my inbox, I've seen more legitimate mail be tagged SPAM than real spam. Having a delete policy when the Cox spam filters are that poor is asking for irate customers.