Things that make you go hmmmmm . . .

I had a friend whose father was the head of a research center run by the state of New York. His father's secretary was crazy; she was also civil service, and hence practically unfireable. After the secretary started throwing away any invitations he received in the mail, her mother actually had to step in and take over the job. I never understood what motivated that secretary, but I suddenly find myself plagued by the same problem: Evites sent to my gmail account are killed.

I don't mean they're marked as spam; I mean I never get them. They don't show up in my spam box, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to add "evite.com" to my list of allowed senders. Since the emails never show up in the spam box, I also cannot ceremoniously move the email into my inbox and tell Google to route further such straight to me.

Aside from a personal plea to my friends not to send me more evites to my gmail or janegalt.net addresses, I am throwing the technical issue out to my readers. Has anyone heard of this? And if so, how do I fix it?

Update Yes, yes, I considered the possibility that I was not actually being invited to these parties. When I log into Evite, the invitations are there. I have actually sat with a friend, watching them type my email address into the list and hit "Send". No Evite.

Comments

Evite and gmail play well with each other in my sandbox. Maybe your friends aren't actually inviting you?

Posted by Matt B | January 11, 2008 9:06 AM

Have you tried adding a filter to "star" emails from evite? It's not the same as whitelisting the domain for a spam filter, but it might prompt gmail to be on the lookout.

Posted by Matt B | January 11, 2008 9:26 AM

I was wondering why Gmail is still in beta.

Posted by njd | January 11, 2008 9:57 AM

After running some searches, it appears that this is a problem encountered by other people. It also appears, unfortunately, that they have not had any success in fixing it.

Posted by Jonathan | January 11, 2008 10:13 AM

I have not had that problem with evite, though recently my mom told me she had never recieved her evite to my baby shower. When I checked her computer I found that she hadn't downloaded any emails in 3 months (why they had to be manually downloaded into Outlook Express was beyond me). I clicked on "Send/Receive" and voila, there it was!

Since you aren't retarded with computers like my mom, I'm not implying that's your problem, but I would suggest you set up an evite account (which is free and they don't spam you) and include all your email addresses in your profile, but have evite notify you of the evites you receive through one address that you know doesn't have this problem. That way your friends don't have to keep track of which address is OK to use, and you should start receiving all your evites without any problems.

Posted by Christina | January 11, 2008 12:54 PM

Evites: Another Free Market Success!

Posted by Google Ron Paul | January 11, 2008 1:48 PM

Make sure you don't have evite.com in your block list. Those sites never even get to the spam folder. At least that was the problem I had on my Yahoo! account. Gmail probably has something similar.

Posted by Nelson | January 11, 2008 2:53 PM

Could be on the evite end? MAybe someone your email address is in their database as someone who opted out or something. Could try emailing EVITE.com to ask.

Posted by semm11 | January 11, 2008 4:04 PM

I run my own mail server and am having the same issue with evites not showing up. I show up on the invite list (and my friend keeps asking why I don't RSVP.)

After looking through my spam filter logs and not finding anything I looked at the mail system logs. They show no connections from evite's mail servers at all. Looks like there's something screwy on evite's side.

Funny thing, after I RSVPed, the evite reminders for those events started showing up in my mailbox.

Posted by bkreed | January 11, 2008 5:28 PM

I can only think of an annoying workaround:

Go into your evite account and change the default email address to a non-gmail, non-yahoo account (yahoo has this problem, too). This would probably be your college/grad school alumni email account. Then set the forwarding address in that alumni account to your gmail address.

Of course, if your friends are entering your gmail address fresh every time, this won't work. And it sounds like that might be the case.

If either gmail is blocking messages from evite at some early stage, or evite is refusing to send messages to gmail, this should solve the problem. But whatever is going on is bizarre, so it might not.

Posted by Alex | January 11, 2008 7:36 PM

This happened to me as well. I was able to fix the problem by:

- having my gmail account "star" all emails from evite

- setting my evite account so that I receive a text message each time an evite is sent to me.

I'm not sure which one made the difference (or both), but I have since been receiving evites to my gmail account again.

Posted by Lauren | May 5, 2008 2:26 PM