Keeping open communications with our clients is a priority at Gunn & Gunn. With modern conveniences such as email, keeping in touch is easier than ever . . . most of the time. Unfortunately, from time to time we recieve calls from our clients, telling us that they didn’t get an email we sent, or that they are “waiting for a response” to their email after an extended period of time. This is both frustrating for clients, as well as for attorneys and staff. So, what can be done about this?
The first, and most common solution is to call our office. Even in today’s world of instant messages, email, text, facebook and twitter, the “plain old telephone” sometimes is the best solution. Staff and attorneys are available during our reguar business hours to answer your questions or provide you with an update on your case. If you need to call after business hours, leave us a voice mail message, and we will get back to you as quickly as we can.
Sometimes, however, the best way to communicate information is to send an email. If you send an email and do not “receive a response” within a reasonable period of time, perhaps the problem is actually your internet service provider, not your attorney. We have recently been experiencing calls from clients who are not receiving email messages from our office. In almost all cases, these are clients who use smaller internet service providers to provide email service . . . with a few notable exceptions. In all cases, the problem has been the “spam filter” settings.
If you are expecting an email, and do not see it in your inbox, the first step is to check your spam folder. You should realize, however, that if you are using your phone, or mobile device to read your email, your spam folder will not be downloaded to your phone. The default, setting for almost all email clients, is to not “push” data from the spam folder. Therefore, you may need to log into your account online in order to browse your spam folder. If after so doing, you still cannot find the missing email message, perhaps your internet service provider is not delivering messages they consider spam to your spam folder. A classic example of this is Comcast.
For some unknown reason, Comcast has decided that the default setting for “spam” is to not deliverspam to the spam folder. What this means is that unless you make a change, you will not see any email flagged as “spam”. After expending signficant time and resources attempting to resolve deliver problems to comcast.net email accounts, we finally discovered this problem. We also discovered the solution. Rather than taking the time to detail the solution, it is simpler to direct you to a humorous but very helpful video found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIr-yq3IJY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Though the current Comcast interface is a bit different than the one shown on the video, the process is substantially the same. If you are not comfortable turning the filter “off”, then you should at least check the box that allows delivery of email to the spam folder. This will allow the email to be delivered to the spam folder, rather than “silently deleted”, which is the default setting. A similar solution should be available for all other email service providers.
Once you have found the missing email message, you may want to “mark” the message as “not spam”, and may also want to add our email address to your contacts list. You may also want to contact your email service provider, and ask that messages from gunnlawfirm.com be put on a “whitelist” so that you do not miss future email messages. If after your best efforts you are still unable to receive email from our office, you may want to consider a gmail account. We have never had problem with email delivery to gmail. In fact, we use our own gmail account to receive and archive court notices as a backup to our own email servers.
We hope that this information will be helpful to our clients and will eliminate some of the frustration that can be caused by modern technology. We remain committed to providing you the best possible service, and appreciate the trust and confidence you have placed in our attorneys and staff.