Those that know me well know that I’m generally quite anal about email. To date, I’ve never declared email bankruptcy — despite being advised numerous times to do so. I read every email I receive (excluding obvious spam and mass emails) and make a sincere effort to respond to as many as I can. It’s become an almost impossible task now to respond to every email, but I haven’t given up just yet, and hope to try and do better.

Alas, my email inbox suffered a major blow recently. I discovered that after years of working brilliantly, my email path was non-deterministically broken. My email goes to my domain hosting provider, from where it is forwarded over to my GMail account for single stream processing (i.e. all my addresses would merge into a single stream — some would argue that that’s not optimal, but it’s how I like it and it’s part of my flow). For many years this worked flawlessly. However, at some point, and I can’t be sure when this started happening since I only discovered it recently, the forwarding path started silently and unpredictably failing. The speculation from my hosting provider is that Google has been implementing stricter standards for verifying email senders in order to minimize spam and malicious emails. It is likely that some of the forwarded emails didn’t meet these specs and so were rejected by GMail.