janusz -- I have sent in two different orders (or whatever they are called). I followed the instructions I was sent, but nothing changed. That's when I sent in the second one, and no one ever replied to it.

By giving your email address to mailing lists you will incur a ton of spam emails as some companies sell email address to other companies, or their security is not very good and they get hacked.

If your problem is filing mail into different folders then you will need someone to help you sort this out, either someone on here or Fastmail.

There are rules in your account section that you can set for all incoming mail to filter into the required folders or discard them.

Thank you, Terry. The preceeding 18 or so pages of this thread have been about just that -- how to get stuff sent to the right folders. I have tried the suggestions that kind folks here have offered, but the plain fact is that FM is no longer trying to learn what goes where. I don't know what happened; it worked so well for so long. :(

I could try contacting support again, but the last two encounters were not helpful. Did FM get sold or something? Why did things change?

I would wait until someone with a few brains on here can help you sort it out.

I have to say that I am very impressed with the "brains" who have helped me try to solve this problem. I don't think it's their fault that the issue hasn't been solved; I think something has gone on at FM that most of us don't know about.

I can continue to manually put emails where they belong. What irks me is that I'm paying FM to do that for me. They were, and now they're not. Why won't they fix it? It feels to me like they just don't care. I will likely not be the only person who leaves because the service is so poor.

What are your current problem?

• Your original post has two complaints:
  • Newsletters you had recently subscribed to were not arriving at your Fastmail account in any folder. In a later post (shown above), you said that the newsletters were getting "bad address" notifications for email sent to your Fastmail address.
  • Messages showing up in the wrong folders. I'm not sure if this is only a spam / not-spam issue or some other folder filing rules you are using.
• If you will trust me, I will send you a Fastmail PM (private message). If you open it I will discuss this privately so you don't reveal your email address in this open forum.

Bill

Bill, hi! You've ridden to my rescue so many times... Thank you.

OK, here's what I've done: I have opened a zoho account for new and renewed newsletters. But I am still getting older ones in my FM account folders (newsletters which FM used to place correctly, but doesn't anymore). It's as if FM is just guessing day-to-day. Also, opening a new zoho account solved the problem with senders telling me they got "bad message" (or whatever it's called) since I was no longer using an FM address.

The issue now is the old faithfuls, the newsletters I've been getting for years. EarthSky (a daily), for example, will end up in spam one day, personal another, commercial the next day, and accidentally make it to newsletters a couple of times a week. There is no rhyme nor reason.

The same thing happens with my commercial emails/orders. That account is a different address from any of the other accounts, but FM exhibits the same random behavior. Some of these are places I've done business with for years, and FM used to send those emails right to the commercial folder. Now they go to other folders as well.

Did this ever get resolved?
 

OK, I just spent half an hour reading thru this entire thread. It's kind of like a train wreck -- I couldn't look away.

So, did this ever get resolved? I feel like I've read most of a crime/adventure novel, only to find the last chapter ripped out.

If this never got resolved, I'd like to help. Let me know. Post a reply, or send me a private message.

It was resolved -- for a while. My newsletters actually went where they were supposed to for a couple of months. Now I'm back to sorting every morning. If an expert intervenes, FM seems to respond. Left on its own, it's apparently just be guessing about which folder to put my email in.

Okay. Can you describe as specifically as you can what this "sorting every morning" entails, step by step? What things need to be sorted? By what criteria are you sorting those things? How many possible actions are there for each sorted thing?

Are these e-newsletters the only kind of incoming messages that you're having this type of difficulty with? When they "went where they were supposed to for a couple of months", precisely what place or places were they going to? Does that place (or those places) still exist, but now you have to move the messages there yourself by hand, whereas previously they were landing there automatically? If so, what did you do originally to make that automatic behavior start happening in the first place?

By the way, do you *always* interact with your FastMail account by using the FastMail Web interface, i.e. from within a Web browser? Do you *ever* interact with your FastMail account by using a third-party email program or app? Do you *ever* interact with your FastMail account from a different location, or using a different device, from your primary one?

I remember reading earlier in this lengthy thread that you had exactly three different email addresses that you maintain in active use. Is that still true today? If so, do all three of them end in "@fastmail.fm" or "@fastmail.com" or any of the dozens of other top-level domains that FastMail owns? Do the three addresses consist of a main address that matches your FastMail login username, plus two "aliases" of that address that you created yourself from within FastMail's Web interface?

Hang in there, and I'll do my best to help you get this all figured out and squared away. =)

I have three FastMail addresses ending in fm, us, and net. The "US' is my commercial account. The "net' is the newsletter account. The fm (com) is my personal email account. The newsletters end up in any of the three accounts. Each morning I move the newsletters to their correcsponding "net" folder from the "fm" and "us" folders and from spam. So my assumption is that FastMail isn't learning like it did in the days of old.

Being very careful with nomenclature is important in cases like this to avoid misunderstandings. I suspect that you're using the term "account" here to mean something different from the word's strict definition in the context of a technical discussion about email. Rather, I suspect that you have exactly one FastMail account; that the canonical email address associated with that account (i.e., the address you would type in as your username when freshly logging into the Web interface) is the one ending in "@fastmail.fm"; and that you've created two alias email addresses that are associated with that same account, one ending in "@fastmail.net" and the other ending in "@fastmail.us". Is that correct?

Meanwhile, inside your FastMail account, there exists a set of mail folders, which may or may not be nested hierarchically (i.e. with sub-folders "inside" a parent folder). In the context of this discussion, the terms "account" and "folder" mean very different things. For clarity, let's try to be consistent in using each of those terms according to its precise meaning.

Okay, this is an important aspect of troubleshooting your situation: Please post a list of all the folders (and sub-folders, if any are nested) that presently exist within your FastMail account, as those folders appear in the column down the left side of your screen when you're viewing your account in the Web interface. (Or if you know how to take a screenshot image, you can post a screenshot of that folder list instead.) If you have any "parent" folders that contain sub-folders, please be sure to show all the sub-folders indented directly underneath their parent folder.

I've been a FastMail user for something like 16 years, and as far as I know, FastMail has never had a feature whereby it "learns" where certain messages are supposed to be filed in your folder hierarchy based solely on "watching" as you move messages from place to place by hand. If I'm right that such a feature does not exist in FastMail and never has, then any automatic placement of incoming emails into certain folders other than your main "Inbox" folder that you may have observed in the past was being driven by some other process, such as the one that does so if the destination address of an incoming message is formatted in certain special ways that make reference by name to the folder into which it is to be delivered.

— — —

By the way, in my previous post from last night, there are many specific questions that I asked to which you did not respond. It will help me to help you if you would kindly answer all those questions, please.

I will do my best, but I am a shut-in with a serious auto-immune disease that leaves me quite unfunctional My energy levels are unpredictable.

I was told by someone with the knowledge of the inner workings of FastMail that folders with specific addresses could be "matched;" i.e., folders with specific addresses would receive emails into their corresponding folders. I know this to be true because it has worked that way before. This prorblem has surfaced only within the last two or three years.

Yes. I use two aliases.

Here are the folders I use:

Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Trash
Spam
Newsletters
CommercIal

Just so you know, I am happy to keep using FastMail even with these issues. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to solve this problem, and I don't want to go through another marathon with these health issues. That said, I don't wish to create a sucking vortex of time in your life, either! I am 71 and not tech savvy, as you have no doubt discerned. I suspect a lot of the problem is my fault as I do not always remember to change the address when I am writing to business interestes or companies from which I receive newsletters. Therefore, the email could be going out from the commercial alias with the newsletter alias on it. I have greatly improved in this area, but I'm sure there are the odd times I forget.

I will do my best, but I am a shut-in with a serious auto-immune disease that leaves me quite unfunctional My energy levels are unpredictable.

I was told by someone with the knowledge of the inner workings of FastMail that folders with specific addresses could be "matched;" i.e., folders with specific addresses would receive emails into their corresponding folders. I know this to be true because it has worked that way before. This problem has surfaced only within the last two or three years.

Yes. I use two aliases.

Here are the folders I use:

Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Trash
Spam
Newsletters
CommercIal

Just so you know, I am happy to keep using FastMail even with these issues. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to solve this problem, and I don't want to go through another marathon with these health issues. That said, I don't wish to create a sucking vortex of time in your life, either! I am 71 and not tech savvy, as you have no doubt discerned. I suspect a lot of the problem is my fault as I do not always remember to change the address when I am writing to business interestes or companies from which I receive newsletters. Therefore, the email could be going out from the commercial alias with the newsletter alias on it. I have greatly improved in this area, but I'm sure there are the odd times I forget.

Actions which automatically file messages into folders
 

Incoming messages are by default delivered to your Inbox folder. The only exceptions to this are:

• Plus addressing: For example, if your account name is janecitizen@fastmail.fm, incoming messages sent to janecitizen+newsletters@fastmail.fm will be delivered to your Newsletters folder (case is ignored).
• Alias targeting: In the Settings>Aliases screen you can change the Deliver to: target to one or more addresses. To deliver messages sent to that alias to your Newsletters folder, set up a plus address as described above for that folder. You can delete any delivery targets you don't need. In other words, you can delete the default Deliver to: address and add one which delivers messages to a specific folder. You can set up more than one target address, so you could use this method to deliver messages sent to that alias to more than one folder (or an external email account).
• Subdomain addressing: For example, if your account name is janecitizen@fastmail.fm, incoming messages sent to newsletters@janecitizen.fastmail.fm will be delivered to your Newsletters folder (case is ignored).
• Rules: You can automatically file messages to folders using the Settings>Rules page. This type of rule will show up in the 3. Organize section of your rules. Rules will overrule alias targeting, plus addressing, or subdomain addressing.

Of course, an email client (such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.) connecting to your Fastmail account can have it's own rules which can move messages to folders. If the email client is connected using IMAP, these client actions will also be visible if you use webmail. In other words, if an email client rule (or a manual action by you) moves a message to a different folder, it will be moved to that folder no matter how you view your email.

You also need to realize that in Settings>Preferences>Reading>Conversations, you can choose to group messages with their replies or show every message separately. If you group messages with their replies (sometimes called a threaded view), you will normally be able to see all messages associated with that conversation (sent message, replies, etc.) if you view any message in that conversation (no matter what folder it's filed in). This may make it appear that messages are copied to folders without any action on your part, but actually you are just viewing messages in multiple folders when you read any of the messages in that conversation. If this is confusing, you can use the old style (show every message separately).

Bill