There's no question that the reality of modern email systems is that they must have good spam filters. Whether you have an obscure email address on an unknown server or a dictionary word address on a popular server like yahoo.com, you're going to get unsolicited junk email. If you're lucky, it's a trickle. If you're not then your experience is like mine: I get over 1,000 spam messages each and every day and would have long ago given up on email entirely if it wasn't for solid, reliable spam filtering systems.

The problem, however, is that sometimes the system guesses wrong and tags a message as spam when it's actually legitimate email that you want to receive. Huge drag, but fortunately if you identify and mark as non-spam one of those messages, most systems, including Yahoo Mail, will be smart enough to not pick out subsequent messages from that recipient and mark them as spam.

So let's jump into the world of Yahoo Mail and have a look at how things are organized. First off, when you log in to Yahoo Mail, look on the left side and you'll see a list of folders:

Notice the "inbox", which is probably what you pay attention to. Click on it and you'll see the mail in your inbox:

See a message in there that is spam? Okay, first lesson: check the box next to the message, then click on the "Spam" button just above it:

Now let's look at the other side of things. To check the spam folder, click on "spam" on the left folder list. Now you'll see something probably quite similar to this:

Mostly complete junk, as you would expect, but it turns out if I scroll down a bit, there's a message that isn't spam. In fact, it's from me! Check it out:

As you can see, to move a message out of the spam mailbox, select the message then click on the "Not Spam" button.

Done. Fixed.

Now, dig into your spam folder, find what you need, and axe everything else. And good luck with your email challenges!