On the hunt for missing emails
Q: A good friend of mine toldme he has sent me numerous emails. But I never see them. He has my correct address and he doesn’t get any bounce-backs. What could be causing this problem?
A: There are a few things that can cause incoming messages to vanish.
The first things you want to check would be if you are using any email filters that could be intercepting these messages and moving them to another folder.
Outlook, as well as many other dedicated email clients, offer the ability to set up rules that look for email with specific content and take actions on those messages based on how you have the rules configured.
An incorrectly configured rule like this could be capturing messages that you didn’t mean to filter.
Another common cause of missing email is an overaggressive spam filter.
Spam filtering is often pretty good, but it’s not foolproof so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on it just to make sure you’re not missing anything important.
Q: I see that Apple has released the latest version of their operating system. Should I update to Big Sur noworwait for a bit?
A: Generally speaking, I tend to be an advocate of updating operating systems as soon as they are available. Especially with Apple as they tend to be very reliable and the updates tend to be mostly trouble free.
But with Catalina and now Big Sur, the changes in the operating systems have brought serious challenges to the functionality of the Mac computer.
Catalina was the release that killed off 32 bit apps, which caused some applications to simply stop working. Fortunately, most of the software vendors were pretty quick to push updates that restored functionality. Big Sur has had some of the same issues where certain apps will not function properly.
I recommend caution when it comes to updating.