I’m testing out a new, very well reviewed email service. The first thing I wanted to do when I signed up for it was to see if people could actually see it, since with my current (problematic) email service, I’d seem to initially end up going into peoples’ spam folders more often than not.
So a couple of days ago I sent some test emails from this new account to family and friends who use a couple of different email services, and I got some very different, very confusing results:
Person 1 — let’s call this address from my contact list “Person 1 <person1@gmail.com>” — received it in in their inbox, no problem.
Person 2 — “Person 2 <person2@gmail.com>” says he didn’t receive it at all.
Person 3 — “Person 3 <person3@gmail.com>” says it went into his spam folder.
Person 4 — “Person 4 <person4@gmail.com>” says it went into her spam folder.
Person 5 — “Person 5 <person5@icloud.com>” says it went to her inbox.
It seems that iCloud receives it no problem, so no issues there.
The variety of Gmail experiences, though, was weird. One person received it in their inbox, two had it go to their spam, and one didn’t receive it at all.
I re-sent all three of those non-inbox receivers again — People #2-4 — exactly as they had been sent the first time.
Now Person 2 received it in his spam, but at least he got it.
Person 3 says it still went into his spam.
Person 4 says it went to her spam, but before I could test it further she adjusted it so this email address of mine is now whitelisted, so sending more to her won’t help see reliable results on where my email is going.
But yeah, with the Test 2 email, sent precisely the same way as Test 1, now Person 2, who didn’t receive the first test at all, got it into his spam. Same email address, to the same person, sent the same way, now behaving differently on the receiving end. Weird.
For the final test, I removed the name attributions. So instead of “Person 2 <person2@gmail.com>” I just sent it to “person2@gmail.com“, and then “person3@gmail.com“.
Person 2 finally received the email into his inbox.
Person 3 finally received it into his inbox.
It’s all very confusing. Different people, even using the same email service, are having various different results from my tests sent from this new email address of mine:
– Person 1 received it the first time, contact name + email address test, and it went right into his inbox, no problem.
– Person 2 didn’t receive the first test at all. The second test, with his name attached from the contact list, went to his spam folder. The third test, where I removed everything except just his email address, finally went directly into his inbox.
– Person 3 says the first and second (name and email address together) tests went to his spam folder, but the third (email address only) went to his inbox.
I’ve been in touch with this new email service to ask what may be happening, because if I’m going through the hassle of changing my email address all over again, it better damn well be one I know is reliable and can actually get the job done of sending and receiving emails properly and efficiently. And this is a pretty inauspicious start.
Meanwhile, I throw it to you, dear reader, who may have some other technological insights that this email service doesn’t: Any idea what’s happening here?