How to guarantee that I see your mail.

SpamProbe and SpamAssassin filter out most of the spam I get (see here for details on how to set them up). I still have to visually scan and delete between fifty and a hundred spams a day, but that would be in the thousands were it not for the spam filters. Sometimes, though, the filters mistakenly identify a good email — known in the business as a ham — as spam. If you've sent me mail and I haven't responded, it might be because something about your ham smelled too much like spam, causing the filters to eat it.

You can avoid this by putting a special marker in the "Subject:" header of your mail:

   Subject: [KNOTSPAM] Hi, Karl, long time no see...

The "[KNOTSPAM]" causes the mail to be put into a special folder, reserved only for mails with that string in the subject.

If you know how to add custom headers to an email, you can add this new header instead, to achieve the same effect without polluting the subject line:

   X-Knot-Spam: yes

Either of these will prevent the filters from mistaking your mail as spam.

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