All Spammed Out

When your email telling FAS-IT that something is wrong with your email bounces, you know things have gotten bad. Really bad.

A number of FlyBy readers were slightly concerned that emails being sent to their FAS addresses were bouncing when they were forwarded to their Gmail accounts, after a similar problem was reported a few weeks ago.

To find out why, FlyBy emailed Noah S. Selsby ’94, Senior Client Technology Advisor of FAS from—shame on us—a Gmail account.

Surely enough, it bounced.

With the flashy “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” message sneering at us from our inbox, we promptly picked up the phone and called Selsby up, demanding to know why Harvard’s servers were rejecting us.

After consulting the email gurus of FAS, who then investigated the problem this morning, FlyBy has Selsby’s response after the jump.

“It appears that Gmail suffered the exact same problem that FAS and @College suffered at previous times,” Selsby said. “Gmail has been declared spam by a number of spam-monitoring companies. As a result, a number of third party filters are filtering out Gmail.”

Great. Spam filtering sites think Gmail is spam. Can you say ‘ironic’?

“Essentially, we’re talking about two third party companies that are not really meeting eye to eye on what the nature of their particular service is,” Selsby said. “So it's kind of ironic, but the same thing that Gmail did to @College, SpamHouse [one of the Spam-filtering sites in question] did to Gmail.”

Yes, it is kind of ironic.

Selsby said that they are working to resolve the issue right now, if it has not been resolved already. In the meantime, he recommends that students notify FAS-IT (obviously not by email) if there are still problems sending to or from Harvard email accounts with Gmail.

Makes me wish I still had my AOL account.