Listmaster vs. Gmail

Submitted by Cord on

We get regular requests from Gmail-Users that don't receive their own mails back, when they post something on a mailinglist to which they are subscribed.

So if this happens to you, first check if your mail shows up in our mailarchive.

If it appears there (wait some time that the archive can catch up) your mail has been successfully posted to the list, and your copy has also been send and is most likely accepted by Gmail. But Gmail seems to drop that mail internally (or sort it in a spamdropbox?) maybe because From and Receipient-address are the same. (We get two or three requests of that kind per week, and everytime we investigated, we found this is the case)

If it doesn't appear in the Mailarchive and your mail has been accepted by our mailserver murphy.debian.org, you most likely have lost against our Spamfiltering. (Did you know that ControlExtension matches the string Rolex?).

Then feel free to report to listmaster@lists.debian.org and provide as much info about your lost mail as possible, helpful would be:

  • your IP
  • the time you send (including Timezone / difference to GMT)
  • the Message-Id
  • your from-address and the to-address

Keep flamemailing.

distribution: 
debian

Comments

Carlos Martín (not verified) replied on

From my experience, GMail doesn't drop it, it recognises it as the mail you just sent and just won't show it. If someone replies to your mail, GMail also notices this and does show your original mail in the thread.
It's a bit counter-intuitive in the beginning, but I like that feature.

Cord replied on

Carlos, as not Gmailuser i cannot tell if it possible to make those mails visable, without getting a reply. However, in my experience as listmaster, this feature is unexpected for the average Joe User.

And you should keep in mind that in many cases someone has a problem, writes a mail to a list, and then hopes to get an answer. If answers aren't coming in in minutes (which is often the case) the user starts to wonder if (s)he has mastered the spamfilters or there is another problem.

So my opinion: At least this behaviour should be configurable, and the default should be to not hide mails til it becomes part of a thread.