Tuesday, March 3, 2015

How to get Wowway to stop blocking your email

A number of people I know use Wowway for their email since they have Wowway as their ISP.  The problem is that Wow has their email server configured to reject damn near anything that looks like email.  I can type a one line, plain text, email and send it to a Wowway user and I will get a delivery failure reporting that the message was rejected as spam.  Note that the email is not delivered to the recipient's inbox at all so they won't even find it in their Spam folder.
Amazingly, even email sent to postmaster@wowway.com will be rejected which is a violation of email "good behavior" practices.  How else can someone complain?
These friends have spent countless hours on the phone talking to Wowway support and apparently the support staff has no idea how this works.
I have determined with some testing that a Wowway user can setup the email addresses of their correspondents in a Mail Preferences setting called "Trusted Addresses".  This setting is apparently used by the mail server to allow incoming email from those addresses without enforcing the overbearing spam rejection policy.

Here are some instructions: 

Have the email recipient do the following on their computer:
In your Internet browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc), go to www.wowway.com,   click on the “Email” link along the top of the page.
Login to your Wowway account on the email panel:
Click on the Inbox link:

 


You should now be on the Web Mail page for your Wowway email account.
Click on Preferences (tab), Trusted Addresses (option on left), then enter email addresses of anyone having trouble sending you email:




PS I am a mostly satisfied Wowway customer.  However I do not use Wowway for my email for obvious reasons.