Why are my emails not arriving

May 1, 2023 10:58 AM

In the past week I have had 3 emails not arrive. Three different senders. Three different kinds of email. The senders are certain the emails were sent. The emails never arrived. I searched for them, including in my spam. I use gmail. Note that it's entirely possible other emails are missing, but I only noticed these because they were important enough to follow up on.

1. An email with an attached PDF letter sent to me and cc'ed to one other person.

2. An email forwarding me an email sent by a website to a friend.

3. A google meets invite for an appointment. Emails from the person setting up the appointment have come through as far as I know.

posted by If only I had a penguin... to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Have you received other emails in the same time period? Have the senders received any sort of bounceback notification yet (could take a few days to receive)?

Have you tested it yourself by sending some emails to yourself from another account? Can you send emails from your troublesome account?

How are you accessing your gmail? Do you use a web browser or an email client?
posted by hydra77 at 11:04 AM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do you have punctuation (periods) in your email address?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:05 AM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

We've seen gmail rejecting emails that are "not rfc 5322 compliant", that have duplicate headers. Outlook gets them, but gmail rejects them. That's something the sender would need to fix though.
posted by Garm at 11:13 AM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Possibly someone else with a similar email address to yours might have been getting the emails. I've had the same thing with my [e-mail] address, where someone with [e-mail] was getting my emails from time to time, and I'd occasionally get theirs.

Gmail doesn't recognise punctuation in email addresses, apparently. After I didn't get an email about a change of flight, I created a new email with [e-mail] and it's not been a problem since.
posted by essexjan at 11:39 AM on May 1, 2023

Gmail not recognizing periods in addresses should *reduce* this problem, in that no matter how many periods someone adds to your email address, you'll still receive it as long as the letters in the correct order. Gmail does recognize underscores and treat them as entirely different addresses.

Do you know, 100%, without a doubt know that the emails were addressed correctly? All of the examples sound like they could just be typos.
posted by sagc at 11:48 AM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

The dot thing is 100% a red herring. Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses, and they never have. Whoever owns [e-mail] also owns [e-mail] and always has (and vice versa). That's why if you're also named John Doe and you try to register, you'll need to add something besides a dot to make your address unique.

If you didn't receive these emails and the senders didn't get bounce notifications, then they probably sent them to an incorrect, but valid address. If you have [e-mail] and they sent it to [e-mail] then the owner of the latter email address got mail intended for you and probably just deleted it as misaddressed. Similarly if you have a name that could be spelled a different way, they could have sent the email to a misspelled version of your own name (like jondoe3 or johndo3, both of which could also conceivably exist). From their end, if the recipient address isn't bogus, they probably won't ever receive any feedback that they sent their email to the wrong recipient.

This happens to my wife a lot, because her email is something like janeddc@ (think Jane Doe DC, to distinguish her from the Jane Doe who might live somewhere else). There is a real person with the address janedc@ (only one 'd' there and not two) so sometimes mail intended for my wife goes to the other Jane DC, because people typo it or just don't even listen fully when she gives them her address. Have them confirm your email address and send the stuff again, and move on.
posted by fedward at 12:13 PM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Perhaps the senders are having their email servers banned by Google due to spam reputation. Are they having the same issue with other recipients? This happened to me when I used the cheap/free email hosting that came with my cheap website host, and often there was no delivery error message. Because it was a shared server, any other domain on that server that was sending spam would hurt our score. (Of course Google has no reason to want to fix this, since one of the only ways to get around the issue for the sender is "pay for pro email hosting like Google Workspace").

That would not explain the missing Google Meet invite, but maybe there are two separate problems.
posted by hovey at 12:41 PM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I recently had to help someone move away from Gmail because it had started rejecting emails sent by an automated system he relied on (not just going to spam, but completely gone). It seems like Google is ramping up the "border security" on their email system, rejecting emails they deem unsafe for whatever reason. Unfortunately, there's not a way to leave Gmail while still keeping your address, but you might consider getting an address with a different provider for important emails you can't afford to miss.
posted by panic at 1:07 PM on May 1, 2023

google has started tightening how it generally handles inbound email and is silently killing lots of messages. I've yet to see any convincing argument for the actual mechanism at play here - google is blocking communication between parties with long established communication, new contacts, automated messages and everything in between.

This message nuking is beyond the usual filters for dealing with email from sources with poor ISP hygiene that lack proper SPF records or suffer from a low reputation score. You can always check your sender info against mx blacklist or DNSBL.
posted by zenon at 1:20 PM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I ran into something that sounds like part of what panic describes above. A couple weeks ago I started having anything I sent to Gmail addresses bounce. My email provider said that it was because "We don't offer SPF or DKIM for [my legacy email address]" and apparently that's something Gmail has started caring about. (I get around it using my domain named address as the "From".)
posted by LadyOscar at 1:22 PM on May 1, 2023

Incorrect email addresses tend to replicate. 1 person mistypes your email in a cc: field or whatever. If possible, ask senders to forward the sent mail to you. I get waves of email from groups of people where someone made an error 1 time, and it just propagates, and will occasionally rise up again months later.
posted by theora55 at 1:42 PM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

[I am a professional email postmaster. I am not YOUR professional email postmaster]

google has started tightening how it generally handles inbound email and is silently killing lots of messages

I've seen no evidence whatsoever of Gmail "silently" killing any inbound mail. They either accept it and deliver it somewhere (Inbox, Junk, some other folder) or bounce with very clear indications as to why. If your original correspondents haven't gotten a bounce (and that would likely be almost instantaneous, unless their own provider was having issues delivering mail to Gmail generally), those emails have likely been delivered.

You can search your entire body of email in Gmail for the Message-Id of those emails (which your sender should be able to provide to you. If you start a query in the search box with

rfc822msgid:

and then follow that with the message ID between angle brackets < >, you should be able to see if you've received that anywhere.

(note that these instructions are a little weird because Metafilter eats text between angle brackets)
posted by hanov3r at 4:11 PM on May 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Not an answer to the question as pretty much everything I might say has been covered, but that rfc822msgid:<message-id> search syntax hanov3r mentioned is pretty nifty.

Also you can get angle brackets on Mefi comments by using the corresponding html entity, e.g. &lt; for < and &gt; for >.
posted by Aleyn at 9:45 PM on May 1, 2023

Response by poster: So I will look into some of these but just to note: these were all from different senders. Other emails from those senders get through. My email address if firstname.lastname with no numbers or extra initials or such. These are all senders who have sent me email many times before including other emails on the same day. Two of these (the letter and the email forwarded from a website) were then resent by the person and arrived without incident.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:05 AM on May 2, 2023

My email provider said that it was because "We don't offer SPF or DKIM for [my legacy email address]" and apparently that's something Gmail has started caring about.

SPF has been a released specification for 9 years. It has been 12 years for DKIM.

These two things are fundamental building blocks of how internet email works to validate that when a message comes from the domain @foobar.com, it came from an entity authorized to send mail using the @foobar.com domain.

Without SPF and/or DKIM in place, this domain is ripe for anyone in the world to impersonate it to send spam or worst.
posted by mmascolino at 12:58 PM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]