Ensuring that you can Receive our Emails

Following reports from people that they don't appear to be receiving our emails, the following information and tips are designed to help you ensure that you do.

When people use our contact form to ask a question we ALWAYS respond. On a very small number of occasions our email response isn't received and this is almost always due to it being blocked by spam filters.

With spam now accounting for more than 95% of all email sent across the internet more and more innocent emails are being lost in spam filters.

If you think you may not have received an email from us please check the following:

  1. If you are using software on your computer (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail etc..) please check whether it has a junk email folder (this may be called something else such as unwanted email, spam etc..). If such a folder exists check that it doesn't contain an email from sales@pegasusracingclub.com or john@pegasusracingclub.com.

  2. Access your server mailbox (this is NOT on your PC and you will need to use a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc.. to access it).

    Check whether your server mailbox has a junk mail folder and if so check that it doesn't contain an email from us.

    (NB: if you use PC software to retrieve your email from the server it is very unlikely to look in the server junk email folder, so you will have to access the server mailbox to check.)

    If you are unsure how to access the server mailbox you should speak to the company that provides your internet mail services and ask their help.

  3. To avoid problems in the future you should add the domain pegasusracingclub.com to your allowed list. This needs to be done on your server mailbox, your PC email software and any additional spam filtering software that you use.

Instructions for specific email systems.

If you use one of the following email systems you can click on the link below to get step-by-step instructions to help you.

Yahoo Mail

How Email Works

The journey an email takes from sender to recipient has many points where it is stored, sorted and forwarded - the process is similar to the delivery of a normal letter sent through the postal service.

Click Here to read more about email.
How Email gets from sender to recipient

This is a very simplified description of the journey an email takes.

The steps below are based on emails that are created and received by a PC/laptop using email software such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Many email services now provide webmail access and you may create and read you email using a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc.. etc..

If this is the case an email you send will begin it's life at step 3 and one you receive will end it's journey at step 6.

  1. Unless you use a web browser to access email the life of an email will begin on a home or office computer.

  2. The computer will start the email's journey by either automatically or when it's user clicks a 'Send and Receive' button.

  3. All your computer is really doing is sending the email to a server computer which is owned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This is usually the same company that provides you internet connection (for example BT, Virgin, NTL etc.. etc..)

    If you use an internet browser to access your email you skip steps 1 & 2 and the email is created directly on the server. Whichever method is used the email will now be in a queue to be sent from the server to the recipient.

  4. The server sends the email into the internet (the mechanism of how it gets across the internet is unimportant for the purposes of this information).

  5. Eventually the email will arrive at the recipient's mailbox.

  6. This mailbox exists on a server, again often owned by an ISP, and the email will sit in the mailbox on this server until it's deleted or removed.

    Each email address has a unique mailbox which sits on a server such as this - in fact an email address is just the address of a server mailbox. For example: someone@hotmail.com is the address of a mailbox on a Microsoft Hotmail server.

    If you use a web browser to access your email you will be reading a copy of the email that is sitting in your mailbox on the server.

  7. If the person who has been sent the email uses software on their computer to read emails (for example Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail etc..) their computer will access their mailbox and retrieve the email.

  8. Emails retrieved in this way will be stored in a file on the computer allowing the recipient to read it, delete it, forward it etc.

    Since the file on the recipients computer is also called a mailbox it is easy to forget the fact that the mailbox an email is sent to is on a server and not on the PC/laptop - the importance of this point will become clearer when we discuss spam, spam filters and junk mail folders.

How Spam Filters Work

To combat the massive amounts of unwanted spam that is sent across the internet nearly all Internet Service Providers and mail servers implement spam filters.

Click Here to read more about spam filters.

A spam filter is a piece of software that tries to identify unwanted email and block it before it reaches it's intended destination.

The vast majority of spam filtering takes place on mail servers (see diagram in previous section), although mail software running on local computers often has anti-spam functionality (there are also products on the market that provide additional spam filtering for your computer).

While all spam filters are doing the same job - trying to prevent unwanted email - they all do this in different ways, and their treatment of identified spam varies.

Most modern spam filters will use a variety of checks against each mail message - each check will result in a score for that email, and the scores for all the checks are added up. This results in an overall 'spam' value for an individual email and if this value is greater than a preset amount the email will be identified as spam.

Here are just a few of the checks that may be made against an email:

  • Does the email title contain words/phrases that are commonly used by spammers?
  • Does the email body contain words/phrases that are commonly used by spammers?
  • Has the email come from a server that is know to send spam emails?
  • Does the email contain links?
  • If the email contains links are they links to known spam sites?
  • Is the email plain text or HTML (formatted) text?
  • Is the information stored in the email about the sender and sender's server consistent?
  • .... and many more!

Once an email has been identified as being spam, it may be:

  • Deleted
  • Rejected
  • Moved to a junk email folder

As the people who send spam become better at avoiding spam filters, the spam filters have to become better and more sensitive at identifying spam - this results in an ever increasing amount of non-spam email being identified as spam.

This becomes a problem for any commercial site that sends genuine emails as an increasing number of spam filters will decide that those emails are unwanted.