Comcast e-mail server probably sending utility e-mails, such as PG&E, to the SPAM folder

Twice a week? Try twice a day. Comcast has started routing emails from several church-related email lists (e.g., from "church-list@churchname.org") to Spam. The other day it sent the check-in link for a medical appointment from our healthcare provider to Spam. Yet some emails do go through, and some (not all) obvious spams get filtered out. There is no rational behavior going on here, and I believe it only started fairly recently. I spent an hour talking to tech support, with a guy who definitely knew what he was talking about. He promised to look into it, and I'm sure he will. But basically, his response was "the filters and algorithms are working as designed; tell the people sending you email to contact us." I'm almost ready to stop filtering spam, and set up filters in Thunderbird, since much  more non-spam is getting filtered out than spam. Except that means setting up filters on the email apps on our phones too (which have at best rudimentary filter capabilities). A lot of work to get a service we pay big bucks for to work right.

Edit: Also, a couple of times when I've selected a dozen or so emails in Spam and marked them Not Spam, I've watched them leave the Spam folder to go to the Inbox -- and then get popped right back into Spam. I select and mark Not Spam again, and so far they stay in the Inbox after that.

Hello @jhidley, I also receive my bills through email. This issue would drive me crazy! Could you please send our team a private message with your full name and full address? Our team can most definitely take a further look at this email issue.

To send a Private Message, please click on the chat icon in the top-right corner of the screen, next to the bell icon, and then type or select "Xfinity Support" to initiate a live chat.

Aldrik,

I clicked on the chat icon in the top-right corner of the screen, next to the bell icon. Where do you want me to type "Xfinity Support"?

I've tried typing it in all of the visible fields, but I don't get a response.

You can prevent mail from going to SPAM by adding that address to your COMCAST email contacts. You will need to use the webmail site to do that. Adding it to something like Outlook or similar will not work as it's the Comcast mail that is putting it into SPAM before your mail software can even see it.

I've been having the exact same problem for months, and have not found a solution - marking the valid utility/bank emails as "not spam" sends them to my inbox, then my desktop email client downloads them, but it only works one time - the next time I get an email from those companies it goes right back into the spam folder - this is maddening, especially because I don't get the "pay this bill" reminder emails I set up at my bank. The way Xfinity email server spam filters work, their rules get applied first, and no further rules are processed, so you can't try to write a rule to redirect a valid email out of the spam folder - once it's in there it's stuck unless you manually mark "not spam". Why Comcast cannot resolve this simple issue is a mystery - the cynic in me says they don't care, but my bank has over 200,000 members, Comcast is the only ISP here, so every one of those customers cannot get online banking alerts or confirmation emails - how you can ignore that is beyond me - and my utility company has MILLIONS of customers. My utility sends emails from a variety of email addresses, to it appears Comcast is just filtering any sender if it includes "BGE" in the from address.

I got a call from an Xfinity tech/security guy today (888-565-4329), and got some excellent information, based on his careful examination of all the email traffic from a problematic list that came to me.

Each email sent out to the list seemingly generates a separate list or group; that is, each email has a different IP address from the last. Comcast's spam defense provider uses those IP addresses as its filter. Some of the addresses are known to have bad reputations as sources of spam.

The reason it doesn't always work to add the list to your Comcast contacts is that to Comcast's system everything is not coming from listname@organization.org, but from those separate IP addresses. It would be better if all of a list's emails came from the same IP address. Then that address could be added to one's Comcast contacts and the emails would be allowed.

I hope this may be helpful to others. I don't know if you can ask a utility to stop doing this, but it could be worth a try. I remain convinced that Comcast, or its spam service, started doing something different in the last few months that caused this to start happening. It shows a serious weakness in the reputation model of spam filtering; or else in whatever model it is that sends out emails from the same source using different IP addresses.