She has already forgotten all about her application when she found out that the response she had long been waiting for had been in her mailbox for a long time now, under her junk email folder. However, her discovery was much too late as the job interview has been scheduled a month ago.

Lana is only one among the many Email users who are not well-versed about how their emails work. Every person using an email should know the basic functions of her email folders to make sure that she would not wait for nothing only to find out that it has been under her nose all along.

Some email services automatically block email messages coming from unknown sources especially messages not coming from the people in your address box. Some people prefer to turn off their spam blockers but this may mean being hounded by advertisements, solicitations and special offers to the point that you no longer want to even glance at your email address.

To avoid having important emails going to the spam folder, it is important that you familiarize yourself with your email service provider especially with how they classify unknown mails.

Spam is greatly prohibited among Internet users but some Internet marketers still adhere to this black hat SEO ways of spamming prospective clients. It is thus important to know how the different email service providers label their spam folders.

Spam folders are sometimes called Junk email folder, Bulk email folder or simply Spam folder. These are folders usually locate don the leftmost side of the email page.

Hotmail has a folder called Junk mail and this is where all spam mails messages are stored. The user has to enable the junk filter settings of his email service so that all junk mails will go to the junk folder where they will be automatically erased after five days.

Another email service provide, Yahoo Mail, calls its spam folder as “Bulk Mail” folder. A user has to enable SpamGuard or Yahoo’s spam blocker so that spam emails will automatically go to the Bulk Folder and will stay there until they are erased thirty days after their receipt.

Gmail on the other hand calls their spam folder simply Spam and this is where spam or junk emails go and stay for thirty days until they are automatically erased.

The other email service providers like Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Mozilla Thunderbird have their own folder classification for junk email messages. Microsoft Outlook can sometimes even block your own message and send them to the spam folder.

Mozilla Thunderbird classifies spam under the junk mail folder. The same goes for other email service providers who classify the spam emails they receive under the spam, bulk or junk folder.

-- Cathy Wesson, December 2006.