Just now, I received a call from my credit card company, Juniper. They’re this great Internet-savvy credit card company that turned me down for a credit card a few years ago and, in response to a complaining e-mail from me, called back and took the time to explain how I could get my credit score up. Between their advice and the advice of my bank, Virginia National Bank I now have great credit. Just last week, I paid to receive a copy of my credit score, and it’s at something like the ninetieth percentile. I pay my bills on time, employ the various advised credit-card-payment strategies to get the company to raise my score, etc. Best of all, Juniper has me on this e-mail-based payment dealie, where I get my monthly bill as a PDF, e-mailed notifications a few days before my bill is due, and other great features.
So, it came as somewhat of a surprise when the fellow on the other end of the phone line told me that I’d missed my last payment on my card. I apologized profusely of course, and explained that I simply paid when I got my notice, and I didn’t recall receiving one recently. He, being of the intelligent Juniper-employee stock to which I’ve become accustomed, pointed out that it was probably my spam filter, and that I should add juniper.com to my whitelist.
Ah, yes, my spam filter. I beefed it up considerably two months ago and, among other things, imposed penalties on any message that I receive from an unfamiliar address. “Familiar” means that it’s an address to which I have sent e-mail before but I have not hand-winnowed out of the list. That’s 2,153 addresses. Any e-mail that comes from one of those addresses gets through every time — anything from another address is marked as potential spam, and then run through a series of spam tests to determine whether to keep it or pitch it. Rocket scientist that I am, it never occurred to me that I don’t send e-mail to Juniper — I simply receive it from them once or twice each month. So Juniper’s mail has been getting tossed to /dev/null. D’oh.
I was able to make a payment on the phone — the transaction took just a minute. I apologized, he understood, money was transferred, and, hopefully, everybody’s happy. Equifax is the true arbiter of happiness in the world of money, though, so it’ll be a month or two until our collective happiness can be properly quantified.
My whitelist now contains 2,154 addresses. That should do the trick.