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The University of Minnesota spam filter might have just cost me Summa Cum Laude

17 points by mZ6uYffk ↗ HN
This takes the cake for the most damage any bug has ever caused me. You can find the full details here, https://letrosswrite.com/, but that mostly focuses on the bureaucratic side of things. I thought it might be interesting to discuss the technical aspect of the problem.

For four months now, the UMN email system has sent most of my outgoing emails related to my honors thesis directly to spam, but somehow every email that I've sent to another student or to any of my instructors went through without a hitch. When I reported the lack of responses to the IT department, (I wasn't sure if it was an email problem at the time), they told me that if my email was blocked as spam I would receive a bounce-back email notifying me of the issue. I had not. So far I've confirmed with three separate professors that me emails were being blocked the whole time.

That makes several layers of failure. The system failed to deliver my emails, it failed to notify me of the failed delivery, and it failed to notify anyone on the IT staff of the failed notification (which I would hope they have). Worse than that, students at the UMN are assigned emails which we are required to use, which means that the UMN email system knows that my email is attached to a specific student, and there are a limited number of emails in circulation. Google, Facebook, and and Twitter have to deal with open registration, but not UMN.

I've been a dedicated bug fixer for a large corp before, and I've never seen a bug this bad, but I might be too close to the situation to stay objective. What do ya'll think?

9 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] thread
Rounin
From what you're saying, it sounds like it's time to consult a lawyer, preferably yesterday. When the university hears from your lawyer, chances are they'll find the bug.
mZ6uYffk
Working on it, actually. It's been very hard to find lawyers who will consider taking the job.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
yosito
When you say "the UMN email system has sent most of my outgoing emails related to my honors thesis directly to spam", what domains were you sending emails to? Were they UMN-controlled domains, or external domains?
mZ6uYffk
They were all sent to other umn email addresses of professors in my department. A few of them contained a URL, but many were plain text.
relaunched
My good friend was in IT at the U, for many years. He was the GCP expert and setup / ran the student email system (I believe). I'm happy to show him your post and see if he can put you in touch with some technical folks or shed some more light on the situation.
mZ6uYffk
Go for it. My name's at the bottom of the page and I'm on LinkedIn.
GianFabien
In my experience universities are massive bureaucracies. The more you agitate the more they push back with extreme malice. I have personally seen friends being treated far worse than what you have experienced. We often hear of nervous breakdowns, PTSD, etc from the student counseling services.

My advice may be coming too late. In situations, such as yours, it often helps to personally meet with the persons involved. Face to face contact eliminates the distancing effect of emails and of course removes the interference from spam filters.

sinuhe69
Situations like remind one of the flaw of most email systems: there is no proof for sending and receiving and so email communication is unfit for legal purposes. Signing is actually not hard. I don’t understand why most systems do not implement/employ it.