Email keeps going to junk folder even after I say it's safe.

I haven't read through all the posts but I'd like to make a suggestion to the reason for this happening even if I don't have a solution (and apologies if it's already been said). My wife and daughter both have hotmail email accounts - ie ending @hotmail.co.uk. I also have a hotmail account and it was my original email account. However after some years I changed my main email to a gmail account but I did not want to change my original hotmail account because that was what everyone knew me by, so I set up one of those things (I'm not very technical) whereby everything that would go to my hotmail account would be forwarded to my gmail account, and every email I sent from my gmail account would appear to the receiver as though it had come from my hotmail account.

To be clear, if my hotmail account was ******@hotmail.co.uk and my gmail account was ******@gmail.com, then every time I sent an email from ******@gmail.com, it would appear to the recipient as though it had been sent from ******@hotmail.co.uk.

This worked fine for many years until recently when, on sending messages to anyone on Yahoo, or sky.com or aol.com, it would be rejected with message saying it had been blocked due to sender being unauthenticated. I have yet to resolve this because it appears I have set stuff up called SPF or DKIM or DMARC or somesuch and so far it's been too technical for me (unless I pay someone...). Meantime I had got round this by sending to those people from my hotmail account rather than my gmail one, they would not then get rejected.

Around the same time, my daughter and wife were telling me that my emails to them in hotmail were now going to junk. I said to them, just click to say it's not junk, and then click to say never send emails from this person to junk (which had worked for me). They did this but my emails still kept going to their junk. Eventually I wondered if it was similar to the Yahoo etc problem because I was sending from a gmail address rather than my hotmail one. So I tested sending from my hotmail address and hey presto, the email went into their inbox and not junk.

So it would appear to me that unlike Yahoo and Sky and AOL where the email sent from gmail (but purporting to be from a hotmail address) gets rejected, Hotmail (Outlook?) doesn't actually reject it but instead sticks it into junk. And even though you might tell it not to put future emails into junk, if it's coming in appearing disguised as it were, tighter controls (I'm guessing) now will not let it through (unless I suss out this DMARC DKIM stuff).

So my guess is that the problem is the sender sending from a different address to that which it appears to show it's from. Just my four penny worth. And apologies if I've wasted anyone's time reading through this - but it might help someone.

I have one particular company that I interact with nearly every day. 4 different people. 3 go to Junk, even though I have done everything to mark them as Safe. 1 email goes through each time. This party has a very plain email signature. Today when I was retrieving an order from them in the Junk folder, I asked the Purchasing Agent to remove the links to their corporate email site and the link to Acrobat from Adobe from their signature and VOILA! the test email came to my Inbox. Just thought I would mention this after reading 11 pages of other comments that didn't work.

That is an interesting discovery, indeed. For me, it's from my credit union, and the email is plain text. All it shows is the subject of "ATM/Debit Alert" and the body of the mail is my name, a text summary of any ATM withdrawals, debit card transaction, or deposits/credits, with the amount, date, and time. Therea re no links. For years the mails have been the same, the email address has not changed, nor has the "behind the scenes data," from what I can see comparing mail that no longer likes the inbox, and mail that used to play nicely from a year ago. The only think that I can see is, for some reason, the credit union has a misspelling in their email name, spelling "Member Services" as "Memember Services." Perhaps, the Microsoft server-side filter is a grammar Nazi.

I had a similar problem with one of my inboxes in outlook. It kept sending emails to the junk folder regardless whether the sender was on the safe list or not. I also had the junk folder set up to no automatic filtering. I use gmail for my email addresses and have set up pop accounts in outlook.

The way I got around the problem was to remove the problematic account and add it again. So far seems it seems to have solved the problem.

How did you remove the problematic account? I have tried taking out the gmail address under "Forward my email to" and also disabled forwarding and then enabled it again and added back the gmail address but still get same result going to junk every time.