Burned by Gmail
February 13th, 2008 by Christopher HarrisI got burned by Gmail in a big way sometime in the last few months. Somehow, mail from one of my contacts with whom I had been carrying on an ongoing conversation seems to have suddenly started going to spam. This meant I was thinking things were set up and in a holding pattern when in fact I had been missing e-mails with contracts and other updates. End result, I thought I had a conference presentation coming up this spring, but the group ended up going with someone else thinking I wasn’t interested.
Anyone else ever experience this? Apparently there are some situations in which this can happen. Google acknowledges that if an e-mail, even from a contact, has the same address in the to and from fields, it may be marked as a spam message. Here are some suggestions for occasionally scanning your spam folder to check for false positives. I am rather embarrassed about this, but figured sharing it to try and raise awareness would let some good come from it.
February 14th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
That’s actually a big problem, considering how often I e-mail stuff to myself–reminders, files, e-mails from my school address, and so on. I’d sort of gotten out of the habit of checking the spam folder on Gmail because they seem so good at catching the icky stuff. I checked the Help files you linked to above, and couldn’t see if your own “from” address is automatically whitelisted–although I’ve seen spam that appears to come from my own address, or from colleagues at work. Tricky spammers…
February 14th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Hi Chris,
Your post made me nervous so I scanned about 1900 messages in my spam box. (Took about 45 minutes.) I did not find a single mis-categorized e-mail there. I did find many fine products to increase my attractiveness to women, so not all was lost.
All the best,
Doug
March 21st, 2008 at 1:12 am
Chris, thanks for the reminder. I searched my spam email folder for the week, and found an email from Monday (about to be deleted). The email was a contact requesting assistance on Moodle implementation…I would have felt terrible about missing it, so thank you!
Miguel