Put me on your list

November 16, 2016 6:19 AM

I'm subscribed to a listserv with my Gmail address. I've never received an email from this listserv. They're not in junk or trash or categorized mail. The listserv manager can forward me a message, and I can receive it. The listserv manager has confirmed that my email address wasn't mis-entered and is not getting any bounce back notifications.

I've keyword-searched for these messages in Inbox, Gmail, and Apple Mail. They simply are not arriving.

I am receiving mail from other listservs*.

What am I not thinking of?

*the list manager is using the word "listserv" but it might just be a list of email addresses. I can follow up about this but want to check under every rock before contacting the manager again. I *did not* receive an automated message asking me to confirm membership in a listserv.

posted by OrangeVelour to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Did you check your spam mailbox? Gmail search won't show messages in spam by default, you either have to click the "Spam" folder and look manually or add "in:spam" to your search.

The other possibility is that Google is refusing to even accept the mail because it looks like spam. It's unlikely, Google is pretty promiscuous in what it accepts, but it is possible. The Listserv administrator might be able to find evidence of that in their mail logs, but in practice that's probably hard to sort out.
posted by Nelson at 7:15 AM on November 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah my guess is it's heading into the Spam directory which isn't searchable unless to specifically navigate there. Google does weirdly black-hole some content for little to no reason. I've seen this with poorly configured mail servers, is the person with the mailing list using Mailing List software or just something they cobbled together?
posted by jessamyn at 7:35 AM on November 16, 2016

My guess is that it is mis-entered and the listserv manager is wrong (it may have a non-obvious typo or the manager may not be good at noticing a typo).

Ask the manager to re-enter your name on the listserv as [e-mail] (you can append your email address with '+[anything]' and it will still come to you) and see if that works.
posted by brainmouse at 7:58 AM on November 16, 2016

It's not really *allowed*, but sometimes servers discard messages without notifying anyone. So I'm Nthing Nelson. Outlook.com is a little more known for this than Gmail, but might be worth emailing Gmail support?
posted by getawaysticks at 8:02 AM on November 16, 2016

On top of the list of messages there is a tab labeled "Social." Check in there, recently that is where all my mailing list messages end up.
posted by insoluble uncertainty at 9:01 AM on November 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's likely an SPF issue. E-mails these days typically need some cryptographic stuff in the header, or large providers will bounce them as spam. Has the list admin checked into these settings?
posted by scruss at 1:08 PM on November 16, 2016

Nthing the possibility of the message just being discarded by google before it hits your inbox. I have had a couple of places where I've tried to sign up with a gmail account and it just never went through but as soon as I switched to a yahoo address everything was fine. I let them know I had had a problem with my gmail and they said it was a known issue.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 4:40 AM on November 17, 2016

Have you searched the All Mail label/folder?
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:45 AM on November 17, 2016

If you are genuinely on a listserv, you should be able to interrogate your settings by sending a message with 'QUERY listname' (without the inverted commas) in the body of your message (not subject line), where 'listname' is the name of your list. Obviously, since your problem is that you appear not to be receiving messages from the list, the likelihood is that this too will fail. Again, if it is a genuine listserv, and you know where the servers are hosted (a university site, perhaps?), you should be able to navigate there and log in with your credentials.
posted by davemack at 8:23 AM on November 17, 2016