The amount of spam or junk mail (yes, that kind of junk) has really gone down over the past few years. Things should stay that way until the spammers figure out how to spam you on Facebook. Or have they already done that?

Anyway, I don’t get much spam or junk mail any more. You probably don’t, either. The main reason for that is that our email carriers, our ISPs, are doing an exceedingly fine job of filtering out the crap.

Or are they?

Recently, I paid a visit to my ISP’s webmail site. It’s were I can view my email inbox without having to use my email client program. Better still, I can view the Junk email folder, which is where the ISP places messages it assumes are spam.

I highly recommend that everyone check their junk email folders from time to time. The reason is that, occasionally, some legitimate email falls into that trap. It’s better to check and know that you’re not neglecting a friend who has a “Viagra” joke and that keyword set off the ISP’s spam filter.

Fortunately, I didn’t find any false positives in the webmail Junk folder. There were lots of messages there, messages that never got sent to my email program. Among the lot were some ads that I normally get, a notice from my bank, and some info from shopping sites. I don’t consider that stuff spam, but apparently the ISP did.

Just to test, I took one of the messages and moved it into the webmail inbox. Sure enough, a few minutes later it popped into my email program, picked up like regular mail.

Bottom line: Check your junk mail folders! There may be some legitimate messages there. The only way to know for certain is to look.