Twenty years ago, you would have been protesting vehemently if your telephone service provider blocked your calls or rerouted them to some else. You’d feel outraged if the postal service was delivering your mail to the bloke two streets down.

Twenty years ago, these modes of delivery were what we relied on. At home, for a response from that job interview you had or your monthly bank statements. At work, for a pitch-for-tender request, resumes from new recruits, or cheques in the mail.

Today email has replaced both phone and postal services for these communications. In most instances, we now expect communications to arrive in our work or personal mailboxes.

But ‘90% of email is spam’ warn headlines. So we set ourselves up with anti-spam software, or the IT department does, and hope less of it make its way through into our inbox. However, with spam filters being turned up higher and higher to keep out the sophisticated creations that spammers are coming up with, good email is ending up the victim.

Many of us blithely check our junk mail folders ever so often, more the savvy IT user than your average Joe. We might fish out an important email just before we miss the deadline – to avail of a tax refund, pitch for a million dollar contract, meet a new business partner. I once had the perfect candidate’s resume sent to me – sadly, I rescued it just after she had accepted a job with another firm.

And this is not counting the ‘spam’ that has been blocked at the edge of your network so you never know of its existence.

With business and individual users becoming so vocal, universally, thanks to the Internet, Twitter, and other borderless forums, it’s surprising there isn’t enough of a movement that has pushed the industry to fix this issue.

I look forward to the day when the industry stops hiding behind low ‘false positive’ counts and can promise me that I will receive every legitimate business email coming to me. Regardless of whether I have communicated with the sender before. And that emails sent from my work address reach their destination, allowing the intended recipient the choice of reading it, or not.

Till then, I follow up my emails with a call, “just checking that you have received my email” and keep my fingers crossed.