I use mail rules to sort out what little spam I get from my legitimate email. I have automated spam filters turned off in my mail client.

I don't receive very much spam at the various email addresses that I use for everyday business and friends because I have a few dedicated "spam-me" hotmail accounts that I use for public lists and contest entries and such, which puts the brunt of the deluge on MSN.

So, imagine my surprise when I found that I had email sitting in my Spam folder.

About 5 months worth of email to accounts at the imacquarium.com domain.

I've experimented with custom headers to duplicate the error and can't reproduce it from any of my POP accounts so I'm not really sure how it worked. It seems that the emails were flagged as spam before reaching me somehow and were nevertheless passed through to my mail client and for reasons not fully known to me Entourage helpfully put the "spam" emails into my Spam folder.

It's not an account that I use very often and I do no business from that account, but people emailed me expecting a reply and I feel bad. I've added a new mail rule to un-spam-flag that email.

The aforementioned peril is this: Since I don't use spam filters, I don't spot-check my Spam folders. I would have found this legitimate email sooner had I enabled spam-filtering.

To anyone who hasn't gotten a reply from a message to me at imacquarium.com, I sincerely apologize. I'm catching up on the backlog right now.