E-mail Glitch Creates Delays

Several users of “@college” and “@law” e-mail accounts have experienced service interruptions since last Tuesday as a result of a glitch that caused many e-mails forwarded from these accounts to Gmail to experience severe delays.

“The issue is due primarily to the way that Gmail deals with large volumes of e-mail coming from a single source,” said Faculty of Arts and Sciences IT Client Technology Advisor Noah S. Selsby ’94-’95 in an e-mailed statement to the Crimson. “Because so many students forward mail from their @college and @law accounts to Gmail, Gmail incorrectly identifies it as spam (probably because of the large volume of mail coming from the same provider).”

Both of these accounts are provided by Mail2World, a private Los Angeles-based web-services company.

Anusha Tomar ’11 said that she did not recieve mail from her Harvard account for about eight hours. “There were emails that I was waiting for and expecting that weren’t showing up. Once I realized that nothing was getting forwarded, I just started keeping my @college inbox open.”

Cindy C. Cheng ’10 said she was frustrated after a company that she applied to through Harvard’s e-recruiting program e-mailed her to schedule a phone call while her e-mail service was disrupted. “I received the e-mail at 3:00 a.m. the next morning,” said Cheng, who is also an inactive Crimson editor. She estimated that only half of the e-mails received at her @college e-mail account were being forwarded to her Gmail inbox.

In a notice posted to their Web site on Thursday morning, FAS IT recommended that e-mail accounts that forward e-mail to Gmail be configured so that a copy of all messages remain on @college server.

“Thankfully, when forwarding my e-mails to my Gmail account, I kept copies in my @college inbox,” Tomar said. “If not, I’d have lost several [messages] before I realized that there was a problem.”

According to Selsby, FAS IT and the Law School have submitted requests to Gmail to white-list @college and @law accounts to prevent further mail from being classified as spam. “Unfortunately, Gmail’s white-listing mechanism is automated and the white-list requests have not yet been executed,” Selsby wrote on Friday. “The turnaround time for such requests takes 24-48 hours. While the white-list request process is fully automated, we have reached out to the education representative at Google and are currently working to see if we can get the request expedited.”