Non-spam emails being sent to Spam

Hi, @DavidKR. Thanks for the details on your spam issue. I can understand needing a fix as that is inconvenient! There are a few things you can try for process orf elimination. Have you added a domain of one of the emails to your address book to see if it comes through? If you have a Third-party client you are using, delete that client and see if the issue still persists. Third party sign-in does not normally relate, but in some instances, customers have reported the issue goes away. Did you speak with our Customer Security Assurance department about the issue or was it a technical support agent? Let me know and I can look into putting in a ticket on your issue. 

@DavidKR we definitely want to make sure this is taken care of for you.  Here we are fully committed to providing you with the best experience with your service.  This is not at all the experience that we want you to have and don't want you to feel discouraged.  You have reached out to the right team and we are going to get things squared away.  Let's get started!  Can you please shoot us a message with your full name, complete service address and account info?  That way we can access your account to get started.  

Where do I shoot this message? I went to direct messaging and tried to create a message to XfinityArmand, but no person by that name was found.

To send a "Peer to peer" ("Private") message you may need to:

Click "Sign In"

Click the "Peer to peer chat" icon

Click the "New message" (pencil and paper) icon

Type "Xfinity Support" in the "To:" line and select "Xfinity Support" from the drop-down list which appears. The "Xfinity Support" graphic replaces the "To:" line

Type your message in the text area near the bottom of the window

Press Enter to send it

this is a problem for me as well. I continually mark email from a group (google and others such as freecycle) as not spam and comcast keeps randomly throwing them in to spam.  Putting the group address in the address book does not work. 

@spokey Hi there, Sorry to learn about the spam issues. Please select the chat icon in the top right-hand corner. Then search for Xfinity Support. Please make sure to provide your full name and service address. We'll be able to look more into this for you. 

Thanks! Have you checked your filter settings? Here is a link with more details [Edited: LINK] https://comca.st/3ppwcP5;

This response was unhelpful.  The "link" suggested is not even a thing.  Can't get hold of a real person and the "AI" things they are using have no "I".

I am sorry the link did not work, I have edited it on my end sometimes the system just doesn't like the format. I assure you it was human error and I have a little more determination to get this resolved than our "AI" without the "I". You are in good hands. 

Please send me a private message with your name and address to get started. 

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.

@spokey 

Good morning,

Can you please clarify? If google is bouncing the emails, they should be giving a bounceback error message to explain why the emails are undeliverable. Google appeared to also have an issue recently with delivery to comcast.net specifically that seems to be resolved now, but can you also message me directly with a few specific examples of emails you sent with the issues you are experiencing and I can take a look at our server logs for further details. 

@spokey

Hello! I know its very important to get your newsletter out to your contacts. Are the recipients who are reporting not receiving emails using a 3rd party or Comcast email as well?

For those that are getting theirs in the spam or junk file, I would have them check their email preferences and filters to be sure that they have them opened to receive those emails and that they are set to reach the correct inbox destination. 

Just to clarify and make sure I understand correctly; separately, there is an issue you are seeing being the recipient yourself, is that correct?

Hey @jerbart

I appreciate you sharing with us the issues you are experiencing with the email. I'd be happy to dive into this further and see what needs to be done to find a resolution. Please send me a Peer to Peer message so that I can gather some account details. 

Here's the detailed steps to direct message us: 
 • Click "Sign In" if necessary
 • Click the "Peer to peer chat" icon (upper right corner of this page)
 • Click the "New message" (pencil and paper) icon
 • Type "Xfinity Support" in the to line and select "Xfinity Support" from the drop-down list
 • Type your message in the text area near the bottom of the window
 • Press Enter to send your message

@DavidKR. Please follow these steps for your Spam folder.

Change Spam Filter Preferences

1. Open Xfinity Connect.
2. Click the Gear icon on the top-right of the navigation bar, then click Email Settings.
   

    

3. From the menu on the left, click on Advanced Settings.
   
   
4. Click the Automatically move spam and potentially harmful messages to the Spam folder option.

@XfinityBilly​, please read the thread carefully. Checking that option is what CAUSES the problem. Comcast proceeds to (apparently) randomly direct legitimate emails into the Spam folder. In most cases for me this happens with email lists; specifically, it happens with the lists for the three church and other religious organizations that I subscribe too. Very frequently, replies that I have posted to messages on those lists get sent to Spam.

Of course, I could unselect that option and let all the actual spam come through to my inbox. But that's something I'd rather not do.

@Pooh52​ Let me know if you (or anyone else) learns of a solution!  Keep up the chatter on this tread because (1) it might attract someone's attention at Xfinity,, and (2) I still don't automaticallly check my spam folder, so these comments that show up in my inbox are reminders!

Good afternoon,

Would you by chance be able to provide some domain(ex: website.com) examples of the emails that went to spam?

@XfinityCSAEmail​, for me this is not email coming from Websites. It is coming from email lists. Seemingly random posts from the lists get filtered out as spam, oftentimes posts that I have made myself: Comcast thinks I'm spamming myself. So in order for a Comcast employee to investigate you'd need to join the email list. If you want to do that, I think it would be OK. Let us know.

@XfinityCSAEmail​  Here are four of the most recent domains that have erroneously gone to Spam folder:

@ezcommunicator.com
@flynntitle.com
@qualia.com
@rebuildingtogethermc.org

Hope this helps find and correct the problem.

@DavidKR​ ​

Good morning,

Email lists are derived from their website counter-parts. An example being if you sign up for a homedepot.com email list - their emails will be coming from an email listing of homedepot.com. This is true for all forms of email lists. Regardless of the email list - they will all originate from the same source domain. The domain from which the emails come from can be provided by you as the recipient without Comcast having to sign up for the listing themselves. To note, Comcast does not filter emails to spam on an individual basis - we filter for the whole of comcast.net. Majority of that filtration isn't random choice by Comcast either, its feedback from our end-users. Unfortunately, this can sometimes create scenarios where someone who didn't want to get an email from a specific listing may end up marking the sender as spam and after enough reports of it, will mark the listing going forward as spam. For it to end up being marked as spam, it would have to be a significant amount of emails being marked by our comcast.net recipients which indicates a larger issue in regards to the sender which is either in the form of a server compromise, multiple user email compromises, or unwanted additions of emails to their listings that did not request for their addition. To further clarify on spam filtration as well, its not a simple process where the filter just chooses a single data point and starts filtering emails(IPs for example). As an example, if you were to right click on an email and select "view source" on our webmail, any piece of data within that large string you encounter can be used as a point of filtration of an email. Not just all that data, but also at the server-level. So in regards to your original post - Comcast.net doesn't just see IP addresses and the solution you linked works for specifically instances where you do get the emails, but are sent to spam. The addition of a contact to your address book creates a user-sided allow-list for the sending email address/contact to avoid filtration to the spam folder. Regardless, I would need the sending email domain or some further information of the email(s) itself to look into it and see if the filtration is accurate or if it can be modified. You are welcome to message me directly any of the information as well since any personal information cannot be posted on these forums.

For what its worth, I don't know if its of any relevance, but it is not uncommon for religious emails to be flagged as spam since they are commonly used as a point of attack for scammers. Examples are further elaborated in this article by the AARP: https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2021/scammers-pose-as-religious-leaders.html 

@XfinityCSAEmail, thank you for your detailed response. The specific email lists that get wrongly filtered are:

• Oakhurst Baptist Church, https://www.oakhurstbaptist.org/; list address oakhurstlist@oakhurstbaptist.org
• Atlanta Mennonite Church, https://atlmenno.org/; list address atlmenno@googlegroups.com
• Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, https://oeffranciscans.org/; list address oef-chat@googlegroups.com

Please note that all of these lists are subscription only: to join them and receive the emails, a person has to sign up for them. These lists do not ever send out random emails to people they want to have join them. They are also smallish lists, between maybe 50 and 300 subscribers. It's conceivable that there could be a data-entry error when someone subscribes and the email could go to someone else, who would flag it as spam, but this would be very rare.

The likelihood that all 3 of these organizations have had their servers compromised is also extremely small. I have added all 3 organizations to my address book contacts, and that has not made any difference. You may say that 2 of these are GoogleGroups lists, and GoogleGroups lists are sometimes used to send out spam. But unless Comcast is just filtering out all traffic from GoogleGroups, that doesn't explain why these groups, which do not send out spam, are being flagged.

The only thing left is that the algorithms are filtering out religious content as such, and that, as such, would be censorship. But in fact I don't believe that is happening either, because some emails from these groups--some emails from individual threads even--are filtered to Spam and some are not.

That does seem to bring it back to the explanation I was given last year, that the lists generate different IP addresses for each email sent out, and some of these addresses are being flagged and filtered. This is not particularly rational or well functioning, IMHO, but at least it would explain the phenomena.

Let me add again that there was a period of a few months over the winter when the erroneous filtering was relatively rare, maybe one a day. In the last couple of weeks, literally 90% of the email being sent to Spam is not spam. (And a few obvious spams are getting through to the Inbox.) This suggests that there has been some recent change to the filtering process so that it is once again catching large numbers of non-spam emails. I hope that the information I've provided will be some help in tracking down the problem and solving it.

Good afternoon,

I have looked into the spam filtrations, so here's what I've found:
oakhurstbaptist.org - we've made a few changes to the spam filter that should see a higher rate of emails going to inbox rather than spam. Comcast as a company is neutral towards religious content. The spam filtration exists solely to target emails using the guise of religious content to scam victims of large sums of money. Similarly how they also target emails from supposed banking institutions, princes of other nations, electric companies, government agencies, cable providers, online streaming service providers, a relative suddenly stranded in a foreign country needing immediate cash, etc.

In regards to the other two, due to the nature of how google groups works(free unenforced subscription listings), they will remain with a spam filtration due to the fact that an individual does not have to input their email address to be a part of a google groups email subscription/list. Unfortunately spammers are actively using google groups to add any emails they have obtained over the internet to their spam listings manually. To add, google groups creates a new randomized email address each time a new subscription email goes out making it difficult to target very specific types of emails that can be undoubtedly considered spam or fraudulent in nature. For what its worth, google groups is under constant monitoring and our engineers are always looking to improve our spam filtration, but in this case its a tougher issue than it seems due to the rotation of email addresses and IPs coming from google groups, making each new email a brand new email that our server and spam filter has never seen before. The current configuration is designed to still deliver these emails even during which we are receiving large amounts of "this is spam" clicks from other comcast.net email users against google groups. As mentioned, this is a monitored issue and we are working on a solution, there just isn't an exact date that can be promised due to the complexity of the issue and the technology currently available.

@XfinityCSAEmail​, thank you for your time and effort. I understand what you're saying about GoogleGroups, and frankly this seems typical of how Google starts up a new service without any attention to how it can be used and misused for the benefit or harm of users and the Internet community generally. Google Calendar still feels like a beta in some areas. I hope that Comcast (do other ISPs have the same issues?) will find a way to address this. I doubt if either of these organizations is likely to switch from GoogleGroups to some other provider for email list services, but I will ask whether other subscribers are having this problem and raise the question of making a change.

EDIT: I can confirm that this morning several emails from one of the GoogleGroups got sent to Spam, while several others (including some from the same thread) did not. The seeming randomness of this is part of the aggravation; if I understand you, this is due to Google's assignment of a random email address and IP to each individual message. It seems like the obvious solution would be on Google's end: before making any such random assignment, check it against lists of reported spam IPs, and don't use it if it's on the list. But given Google's evident desire to do the least amount of work possible to achieve world domination, I don't expect that to happen.

@XfinityCSAEmail​, WRT

oakhurstbaptist.org - we've made a few changes to the spam filter that should see a higher rate of emails going to inbox rather than spam

Whatever you've been doing it is not working. It may have worked for a couple of days, but this week numerous emails to that list (some days maybe the majority of them) have gone to the Spam folder.

@VW12​, thanks for joining in. Honestly, I don't expect much help anytime soon. They are "working on a solution" to the Google Groups problem, but they seem committed to a reputation-based approach, which will continue to have these issues. You might try tagging @XfinityCSAEmail​, since this seems to be someone who will respond with details. You might try letting Facebook know (I'm not on FB, so I don't even know if that's really possible). Maybe if FB would come knocking, Comcast might bear down on it a little more.

DavidKR - I agree with you.  I posted on Twitter about the issue and a tech sent me the "form letter" pdf with instructions that are not valid.  Xfinity has to fix the code - I feel as though they are trying to dam a raging spam flood with a pail and a shovel.  Their chief interest is the development cost and not the people who pay the bills.

My understanding is that Comcast outsources this rather than developing it themselves. Presumably there's a competitive market for these services--I hope they are shopping around for a better one. But maybe the one they've got is prohibitively cheap.