Leaders and team members should check their email spam folders more often than they think.
Firewalls and filters almost guarantee that important messages will get grabbed and labeled as “junk.”
For those with excellent email hygiene, checking weekly often suffices, but for those with more powerful filters, checking every other day is imperative.
Far too often, people blame others for not responding when the message got plunked and placed into spam.
Investors, regulators, board members, and other unknown but important entities are often misclassified by an organization’s email filters.
Customers with a poor domain reputation are plagued by this net, as are edge voices from parties you have never heard from before.
The key is to set a cadence of scanning spam.
If done daily or every other day, this process requires less than two minutes and often reveals a broken signal from one or more significant parties.
Unexpected but legitimate senders, poorly formatted but sincere messages, external voices without prior contact, and messages sent from unusual email addresses are all susceptible to this protective safety net.
When waiting on a reply, good leaders presume the other party has responded to them and check spam before getting frustrated. A simple spot-check will confirm or disconfirm.
More sophisticated checkers sort by sender domain rather than date.
Newly registered domains, personal domains, and vendors misconfigured with incorrect authentication often get caught up in the spam filter. One-line messages, like “Please call me today,” often get held up as well.
So why don’t many leaders scan their spam for important messages? Because they didn’t find anything of importance the last time they looked.
It is too easy to presume that nothing important ever arrives in the spam folder. Imagine if you treated snail mail in the same way and never checked your post box.
Leaders who don’t check their email spam folder periodically commonly miss important information. What’s your habit for checking the spam folder? Heaven forbid a Field Note arrives there.
