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Rule #1 if you're applying for jobs or graduate school - Don't use gmail for your email address. Source: Led a hiring committee this year. Interview invitation

Rule #1 if you're applying for jobs or graduate school - Don't use gmail for your email address. 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.

awinder 8y ago
This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door, which is recoverable. A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.
- brlewis 8y ago
  In the past year or so, pulling non-spam out of my gmail spam folder has become routine. Previously it was very rare that legitimate mail ended up in my spam folder, including personal mail from my father from an email address he's been using for decades. A biz that call's gmail's problem gmail's problem is not a terrible smell.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Only the past year? I've been having this problem since for as long as I've tried sending mail to google.
  - jrnichols 8y ago
    the fact that the spam folder is now hidden down under an additional menu makes the problem even worse. users don't even know that it's there.
- sergiosgc 8y ago
  Gmail's spam filters always err on the false positive side. It's always been like that. Add the opaque nature of google operations, and you can't in good faith place the deliverability burden on third parties. It's like trying to hit bullseye in darts in pitch black darkness. 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.
  - jvagner 8y ago
    I used to run my own mail server and spam assassin, and felt pretty comfortable ignoring the Spam folder. 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.
- bhauer 8y ago
  We are a relatively small company and we operate our own mail server, mostly out of a shared belief in data privacy among myself and our staff. We self-host most of our tooling (mail, internal chat, Gitlab, CI/CD, and so on). It turns out this is all pretty simple given modern virtualization infrastructure and, in my estimation, has many upsides versus the alternatives. 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.
- vidarh 8y ago
  Judging by what ends up in my gmail, very few people "can deliver to gmail" in any kind of reliable fashion. It depends entirely on how messed up the spam filtering is for individual accounts. The only reason I'm still on Gmail is that it's so entrenched in my life that tidying things up to move is a massive pain and will take a long time (and no, forwarding is not a reliable solution; my experience is that even forwarding from one gmail account to another will invariably cause some mail to go the spam folder of the account you forward from - yes there are options that are meant to prevent this; no they don't work reliably, and haven't in the years I've been using it, so it means one more place to check mail).
  - fgonzag 8y ago
    Getting started now will make it easier though. I just bought a domain, and started emailing from it and using it for new accounts. I still use both emails, but I always reply from the new one. It's a slow transition, but quite a smooth one (I have email clients that can show an unified inbox). 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
    - vidarh 8y ago
      Absolutely, it's gone from "maybe I should move somewhere" to working on untangling things because I know I have to move. 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.
- megous 8y ago
  You have it the wrong way. Noone can make it so that gmail accepts their e-mail. It's the gmail's job after it receives the connection to process the SMTP commands and deliver the message to you. 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.
  - awinder 8y ago
    You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google, fixing deliveribility issues when google is hard-bouncing, or maintaining reputation of IPs (which you can't do -- thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic). > 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.
    - necovek 8y ago
      > thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic 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? :)
- jrockway 8y ago
  > A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though. 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.)
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    > They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. 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.
    - Chlorus 8y ago
      > the traceback showed he had a broken half-Py2/half-Py3 install. Hey, at least they're _trying_ to migrate to 3 :P
sevensor 8y ago
Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can't trust Google with crucial email. You get what you pay for.
- jocoda 8y ago
  Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to. 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)
  - Chlorus 8y ago
    > Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to. 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.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  I had similar thoughts, but it took a while until I found something like Netlify to handle the domain end of things. My personal site was on DreamHost, who threw in Google Apps for free (this was before the bottom tier went paid). 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.
  - 8y ago
organsnyder 8y ago
I'd suggest that regardless of your email provider, you should obsessively check your spam folder if you're expecting a job/internship/etc. offer. Every spam filter has false positives, and those sorts of messages can trip a lot of the heuristics tuned for actual spam.
- bluGill 8y ago
  True, but this does no good if your email system doesn't accept it at all (the sender gets a bounce) or worse, if your email is silently deleted (not sent to the spam folder). 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.
mattkrause 8y ago
I think you’ve got to meet people halfway here. 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.
- sergiosgc 8y ago
  > 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. Why not? Popularity does not imply quality. If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    People's choice of email provider has very little bearing on their ability to do (e.g.) biology or economics research. Plus, most career centers actively advise students (i.e., many applicants) to sent up a professional-sounding gmail (or similar account) accounts. In short, it makes no sense. 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.
    - sergiosgc 8y ago
      You seem too focused on the exact scenario of applying to graduate schools, when the OP's comment wasn't circumscribed to that, and my comment certainly was much more generic than that. 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.
pjc50 8y ago
"Our outbound email is misconfigured, but this is everyone else's problem"?
- sergiosgc 8y ago
  It's not that simple. You can be perfectly configured and fail to deliver to gmail.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 8y ago
  I fairly regularly get e-mail sent from gmail users in my gmail spam folder.
- megous 8y ago
  You don't know what you're talking about. A lot of the blocking is based on IP addresses alone (or worse, IP address ranges).
neves 8y ago
When I try to be sure that I will get a answer, I always try to write to the company email instead of filling a web form. When Gmail sees that I wrote to a company, it won't put its emails in the spam folder.
jartelt 8y ago
Seems like if you don't change something you are potentially losing out on a lot of great students. Maybe you do not need to change your e-mail service, but I would hope you are at least warning applicants about this issue somewhere in the application process.

awinder 8y ago

This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door, which is recoverable. A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.

brlewis 8y ago
In the past year or so, pulling non-spam out of my gmail spam folder has become routine. Previously it was very rare that legitimate mail ended up in my spam folder, including personal mail from my father from an email address he's been using for decades. A biz that call's gmail's problem gmail's problem is not a terrible smell.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Only the past year? I've been having this problem since for as long as I've tried sending mail to google.
- jrnichols 8y ago
  the fact that the spam folder is now hidden down under an additional menu makes the problem even worse. users don't even know that it's there.
sergiosgc 8y ago
Gmail's spam filters always err on the false positive side. It's always been like that. Add the opaque nature of google operations, and you can't in good faith place the deliverability burden on third parties. It's like trying to hit bullseye in darts in pitch black darkness. 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.
- jvagner 8y ago
  I used to run my own mail server and spam assassin, and felt pretty comfortable ignoring the Spam folder. 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.
bhauer 8y ago
We are a relatively small company and we operate our own mail server, mostly out of a shared belief in data privacy among myself and our staff. We self-host most of our tooling (mail, internal chat, Gitlab, CI/CD, and so on). It turns out this is all pretty simple given modern virtualization infrastructure and, in my estimation, has many upsides versus the alternatives. 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.
vidarh 8y ago
Judging by what ends up in my gmail, very few people "can deliver to gmail" in any kind of reliable fashion. It depends entirely on how messed up the spam filtering is for individual accounts. The only reason I'm still on Gmail is that it's so entrenched in my life that tidying things up to move is a massive pain and will take a long time (and no, forwarding is not a reliable solution; my experience is that even forwarding from one gmail account to another will invariably cause some mail to go the spam folder of the account you forward from - yes there are options that are meant to prevent this; no they don't work reliably, and haven't in the years I've been using it, so it means one more place to check mail).
- fgonzag 8y ago
  Getting started now will make it easier though. I just bought a domain, and started emailing from it and using it for new accounts. I still use both emails, but I always reply from the new one. It's a slow transition, but quite a smooth one (I have email clients that can show an unified inbox). 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
  - vidarh 8y ago
    Absolutely, it's gone from "maybe I should move somewhere" to working on untangling things because I know I have to move. 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.
megous 8y ago
You have it the wrong way. Noone can make it so that gmail accepts their e-mail. It's the gmail's job after it receives the connection to process the SMTP commands and deliver the message to you. 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.
- awinder 8y ago
  You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google, fixing deliveribility issues when google is hard-bouncing, or maintaining reputation of IPs (which you can't do -- thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic). > 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.
  - necovek 8y ago
    > thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic 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? :)
jrockway 8y ago
> A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though. 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.)
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  > They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. 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.
  - Chlorus 8y ago
    > the traceback showed he had a broken half-Py2/half-Py3 install. Hey, at least they're _trying_ to migrate to 3 :P

sevensor 8y ago

Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can't trust Google with crucial email. You get what you pay for.

jocoda 8y ago
Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to. 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)
- Chlorus 8y ago
  > Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to. 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.
chrisfinazzo 8y ago
I had similar thoughts, but it took a while until I found something like Netlify to handle the domain end of things. My personal site was on DreamHost, who threw in Google Apps for free (this was before the bottom tier went paid). 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.
- 8y ago

organsnyder 8y ago

I'd suggest that regardless of your email provider, you should obsessively check your spam folder if you're expecting a job/internship/etc. offer. Every spam filter has false positives, and those sorts of messages can trip a lot of the heuristics tuned for actual spam.

bluGill 8y ago
True, but this does no good if your email system doesn't accept it at all (the sender gets a bounce) or worse, if your email is silently deleted (not sent to the spam folder). 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.

mattkrause 8y ago

I think you’ve got to meet people halfway here. 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.

sergiosgc 8y ago
> 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. Why not? Popularity does not imply quality. If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  People's choice of email provider has very little bearing on their ability to do (e.g.) biology or economics research. Plus, most career centers actively advise students (i.e., many applicants) to sent up a professional-sounding gmail (or similar account) accounts. In short, it makes no sense. 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.
  - sergiosgc 8y ago
    You seem too focused on the exact scenario of applying to graduate schools, when the OP's comment wasn't circumscribed to that, and my comment certainly was much more generic than that. 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.

pjc50 8y ago

"Our outbound email is misconfigured, but this is everyone else's problem"?

sergiosgc 8y ago
It's not that simple. You can be perfectly configured and fail to deliver to gmail.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 8y ago
I fairly regularly get e-mail sent from gmail users in my gmail spam folder.
megous 8y ago
You don't know what you're talking about. A lot of the blocking is based on IP addresses alone (or worse, IP address ranges).

neves 8y ago

When I try to be sure that I will get a answer, I always try to write to the company email instead of filling a web form. When Gmail sees that I wrote to a company, it won't put its emails in the spam folder.

jartelt 8y ago

Seems like if you don't change something you are potentially losing out on a lot of great students. Maybe you do not need to change your e-mail service, but I would hope you are at least warning applicants about this issue somewhere in the application process.