Some E-mails Deleted in Gmail Forwarding SNAFU

Harvard affiliates who set their @college.harvard.edu accounts to forward to Gmail (as any sane and organized person would), ran into unexpected trouble over the weekend. Students noticed that some of their e-mails were not being forwarded properly to their Gmail accounts. And in a surprising twist, Google—not FAS IT—was to blame.

But now the news has gotten worse.

FAS IT announced in a release Tuesday that a Google spam prevention effort not only delayed e-mail forwarding, but that for an unspecified amount of time on Saturday, Google actually "discarded some incoming messages."

Yikes. This poses a problem for students who had set their @college e-mail account to delete messages once they are forwarded to Gmail. FAS IT suggests that students set their Harvard e-mail addresses to keep a copy of any email you forward.

Full text of the announcement, after the jump.

http://www.fas-it.fas.harvard.edu/node/1293

@College Email Delivery to Gmail

On Thursday, October 1, FAS IT learned that Google (Gmail) had started to block email messages sent from @College.  This affected students who forwarded their email from @College to Gmail, or who sent outgoing email from @College to other Gmail recipients.

The issue appears to have been triggered as a protective measure against spam, which commonly involves large volumes of email from a single source.

Gmail is once again accepting all messages from @College.  However, Google has informed us that - for a period of time on Saturday, October 3 - it discarded some incoming messages.   In other cases, messages were queued for later delivery.  Unfortunately FAS IT has not received additional details about which messages were lost by Google. If you were trying to send or receive messages between Gmail and @College on Saturday, please contact the individuals in question to verify that your mail went through, or to resend if necessary.

Since not all external email providers guarantee their service or provide readily available support, we recommend that if you forward your mail from @College, you should configure your account to save a local copy of your messages.  To do so, click on "Options," followed by "Mail Settings," and finally "Mail Forwarding."

If you have questions or require computer assistance, please contact FAS IT at 617-495-9000 or help@fas.harvard.edu.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons/Yug