KnowledgeBase Articles » How do I diagnose Sender-Blocked, Unwanted e-mail?

Monday, August 31, 2026, 15:23

How do I diagnose Sender-Blocked, Unwanted e-mail?

Category: General

Solution ID: 00000354

Summary:

How do I diagnose Sender-Blocked, Unwanted e-mail?

Answer:

You may find some e-mail being blocked where the recipients are reported as "Unwanted". This may be happening for some people but not for others, or for everyone hosted on your server.

If you are seeing the "Unwanted" marking you are probably looking in the "Score" header of the message viewer. As a reminder, to get to this view navigate to "E-mail > Mail Log", search for the problem e-mail, then click on the e-mails subject to pop open the message viewer. In the header section you'll see four (4) expandable sections with a 'plus' icon beside them: Headers, Score, Logs and Body. Click on the "Score" header to expand that section to display the scoring details.

The Score section is where you will likely find the answers to why your e-mail message was blocked. The header line for the Score section also has links to "Report Spam", "Release Message" or "Resend Message". If you click those links you will see your actions logged in the Score section.

If you an analysis that says "Recipient does not want this message" or "Recipient(s) have marked this message as 'unwanted'" then the sender is listed in our "Wanted/Unwanted" database.

The PerfectMail "Wanted/Unwanted" database tracks sender-recipient e-mail interactions. Interactions include reporting a message as spam or releasing a message as not spam. Reporting a message as spam inherently records the sender as a spam sender. Releasing an e-mail that was falsely blocked records the sending address as a wanted sender. End-users who take actions to report spam or release e-mail can only impact themselves, but administrator actions affect everyone on the system.

The Wanted/Unwanted system is smart enough to account for conflicting reporting decisions. So reporting a sender as sending spam, then later releasing their messages means something to the system. Your PerfectMail system takes into account past actions and e-mail traffic patterns in its analysis.

To diagnose a specific e-mail sender, log-in to the PerfectMail Web-UI and navigate to "E-Mail > Wanted/Unwanted".

Search for the sending address and remove the offending records. That will resolve your issue.

Tags: diagnose, investigate, sender, email, blocked, wanted, unwanted

Link to this article: https://perfectmail.com/kb/sender_blocked_unwanted_email

Updated: Monday, August 31, 2026, 15:23

-- David Rutherford