Source: Led a hiring committee this year. Interview invitations and job offers went straight to the junk mail folder. Also serve as Director of Graduate Studies. Admissions and funding offers, as well as general inquiries about availability, all went straight to the junk mail folder. We're not going to change our email service.
users don't even know that it's there.
Best to assume gmail is flawed, which it is, as the parent poster did. At some point Google will realize the image problem and act.
Now that I live in a lot of Gmail accounts, the Spam folder is just another folder I have to check on a weekly basis.
That said, like the OP, despite having DKIM, SPF, proper DNS, and every other measure applied, it's conceivable that gmail might reject some emails from us. I don't have any memory of that actually happening, but I have heard stories like the OP's several times. It's a fairly common topic in conversation forums about self-hosting email servers. I don't expect the situation to change any time soon—I don't expect Google to change their ways and it would require significant pain for me to surrender to the gmail hegemony.
I still have quite a few a accounts under Gmail, but I'll probably do a full change this year.
Having control of my email is very important for me. Google could close my account for any number of reasons (billing dispute, hacked account, etc), and I would lose my actual address since the domain isn't mine
I do have a very old address that is on my own domain, and though that is currently routed to Google, at least that simplifies things a lot, but unfortunately for many years I was not consistently using that address for signing up to things etc.
I mean, assumming that the sender doesn't have broken SMTP client or doesn't follow standards.
It's gmail's user's problem if they don't accept mail or check their Junk folder or use an e-mail provider that they can't contact to solve issues on their side.
In the old days, if I didn't receive mail because my mail provider was rejecting it, it was me who had to talk to them. Free has a cost. And it's gmail users who should be paying it in their time and fruitless attempts at communicating with google. At least they'd realize what company they're enabling and how much it doesn't care about their e-mail.
> In the old days, if I didn't receive mail because my mail provider was rejecting it, it was me who had to talk to them. Free has a cost.
In the old days average email user was being inundated with low-quality spam and getting mired in fraud. Google fixed that problem for their end users. In doing so, they made it hard for a small % of people who want to run their own email servers, but they've given all of these people an out -- go sign up with someone who knows what they're doing, and google is going to effectively outsource the fraud/spam management to those companies.
You can tell me I have it wrong but I'm literally just describing the landscape that actively exists and how to navigate around it for anyone who wants to, but you're not taking out google.
That suggests a simple solution to the problem that can be done on the gmail side: for any small mail server (to pull a number out of my behind, say less than <200 emails a month to any @gmail address for the last 12 months), white list them if they satisfy the rest of the usual requirements.
Even if someone attempts to game the system and creates a number of servers, for an effective spam campaign it means a large number of servers, costs go up.
It might be worth experimenting with "abusing" this behaviour to put your small server on the Gmail whitelist. Start sending a large number of generated emails to a @gmail.com mailbox, log in and ensure none of it ends up in spam (ideally automate that too :), and there we are. Anyone have any idea how many emails that is? :)
If anything, it means that teams are probably too independent and that there is no central approval process for things like sending emails.
For example, a lot of companies use products like Greenhouse. I am sure this will send email from your domain on your behalf. If you don't know what you have to talk to the DNS administrators to add a bunch of TXT records to enable that, you will just notice that some percentage of emails never get delivered (or if the product doesn't tell you that they're bouncing, you may never know. how could you?)
If you use something like Zendesk, you'll note how many people have been burned by this. By default, they end up using something like support.yourdomain.com because despite detailed instructions on how to set up the necessary DNS records to send email from youdomain.com, people still fail to do it right and then complain "nobody ever sees my support tickets".
My point is, email has been abused so heavily that it is somewhat difficult to set up a working system. That was my experience when I ran my own email server. Although I did OK with delivery, I also aggressively filtered messages and used greylisting. This broke a lot of broken email systems, whose administrators immediately blamed me. (I had a long back-and-forth with some company that wanted to hire me. Their email system was super broken. They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. LOL.)
Tangent, but this kind of stuff is super annoying and probably happens far more often than anyone wants to admit. A few friends and I have been commiserating re the incompetence of potential employers who've rejected us because of their own misconfigured environments or fundamental misunderstandings of the systems they run. We had one interviewer close out a candidacy because the code sample "didn't run" on their interview's system -- the traceback showed he had a broken half-Py2/half-Py3 install.
Hey, at least they're _trying_ to migrate to 3 :P
While’s gmail’s filtering is obviously neither your responsibility nor under your control, you also can’t really fault people for using one of the most popular email services on the planet.
I would hope that your department follows up some other way (you surely have a phone number!). Searches are crazy time consuming and expensive, and grad student recruitment isn’t exactly free either.
Why not? Popularity does not imply quality. If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it.
More broadly, grad school admissions--and, even moreso, faculty hiring--is already full of unwritten rules, backdoors, and tacit understands of "how things are done." It emphatically does not need more of those, especially petty ones related to email.
People's choice of poor quality service provider X impacts their ability to do their tasks when the service is poor. X can be email, insurance, banking, anything you externalize in your life.
The fact that a service is popular is a poor indication of service quality, if there is a correlation at all. Examples abound for popular services and products that are poor quality. Usually, the best services are a bit up, from the popular choice point, in the price/quality ratio. More so if there are free (as in beer) offerings in the market.
What's the alternative? Making sure that the recipient gets the message by sending a courier to his home address?
I remember when a buddy of mine, back in the pre-email days, applied for a job at a company. About a week later, he received a letter, asking him to call them. Turns out, he forgot to put his contact info into the application, but they were interested enough to look up his name in the phone book (they also have/had street addresses were I live) and write him a letter, hoping it would reach the right person. "Always put your contact into into an application" isn't a petty rule, and neither is "use an email-provider that doesn't randomly reject messages" in my book.
I would expect both sides to make a bit of effort. Applicants should check their spam folders and follow up, especially if there's a known timeline (American grad school offers need to be extended and accepted by the 15th of April, for example).
Institutions should maybe not rely on only an unreliable, unacknowledged form of communication. Since the applications usually collect phone numbers and addresses, a phone call or letter would be a very reasonable follow up; neither costs more than 50¢ to use. I think all of the PhD programs that accepted me did call and it seems like a good way not only to notify, but to actively recruit.
Agreed. There should be some give and take, some minor reputation at stake. It's healthy to have some people applying back-pressure against popularity. I like the idea that laypeople might hear whispers among their tech-savvy friends that it's not considered "cool" to have a gmail address. Much like having an aol.com email address was seen as uncool in years past. It's perfectly reasonable for some people to be working to give gmail.com a bit of that same reputation.
I haven't laughed this hard in a while. How'd that go with convincing people not to join walled gardens like Facebook and Insta?
And actually, more seriously, the reputation push-back on Facebook is finally reaching levels where laypeople are picking up on it. There's still a huge amount of ground to cover, but laypeople are now hearing the criticism of Facebook. You can see many switching from a state of ignorance to "I don't care; I have nothing to hide." Maybe in a few years we'll see more people saying "you know what, I do find these privacy losses bothersome." As with many reputation matters, it's a gradual process with give and take.
There's a high 9's probability that it will arrive safely, but there's several ways that things can go wrong, simplest of which is that you are deleted by a misconfigured filter.
There are US ISPs (cough sbcglobal) that routinely throw away mail from some arbitrary IPs despite there being absolutely no SPAM blacklist entries for the IP, even if you are replying to a mail sent from one of their clients.
outlook.com once, (and maybe still does) blocked email from an entire C-block for some reason.
(edit - grammar)
And there's the core of all of this. SMTP is a best-effort protocol that does not guarantee delivery. Until someone comes up with something better, we're condemned to seeing "Help! My very important email disappeared in transit" threads on HN every several months for the rest of eternity.
At the very least, I knew that if mail ended up in that inbox, it was usually important.
More to the point, Fastmail allowed me to use Mail.app on macOS and get away from Google's web UI which, despite best efforts on their part - read: none at all - never worked correctly on the desktop with regard to message deletion in IMAP clients.
If I send you an email and gmail doesn't get it to you for either of the above reasons, you won't get a second chance.