I found out yesterday that I hadn’t received two very important emails from NSF regarding an upcoming PI workshop in Albuquerque. I never saw them, they never got a bounce message. That’s not good. So my co-PI (who also didn’t get them) investigated.
It turns out that the piece of crap email server that our department uses—a FirstClass server that’s intended for conferencing, but has had an SMTP and POP server stapled onto it—has some fascinating default settings.
First of all, it considers anything that has more than four recipients “junk mail.” Since the message from NSF went to a list of 20 or so PIs, that made it junk mail. Second of all, the user defaults for what to do with junk mail seem to be set to “Silently Delete.”
(It’s a good thing this isn’t an audio blog, or the muttering I’m doing under my breath right now would get this blog on every filtering list known.)
This explains a lot of things, including why it is that when I use Evite to invite colleagues to parties, more than half of them never get the invitation. Silly me, I invite more than four people at a time.
So, if you’re a colleague of mine reading this, and you’re wondering why some of the mail you expect to receive isn’t making it to you—that’s probably why. And if you’re sending me mail, please send it to my “mail.rit.edu” address, rather than my “it.rit.edu” address.
The fix, for those unfortunates who are stuck with FirstClass as a mail server, is to launch the FC client, open Preferences, go to the Messaging tab, and change “Junk Mail Handling” from “Silently Delete” to “Accept”. You have to do this even if you don’t use the FC client for reading mail (I pick mail up from the server using OS X Mail). And if you’re wise enough to be using a better client, you can then also use better spam filtering than the boneheaded methods that the FC server seems to implement.
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