There was a discussion in one community recently about essential emails not reaching new contributors because they get stuck in the Gmail "promotions" tab.
This is quite concerning, for example, when Debian sends out the yearly announcement for DebConf travel grants / bursaries, if only the regular participants receive that email it undermines renewal and diversity in the organization.
It is even worse if sending people an email that their talk proposal or travel grant is accepted and they don't see that email.
I have a few questions about this:
- are other communities who operate mailing lists or send announcements noticing a similar problem, for example, announcements not reaching people or lower participation in email discussions?
- are people noticing it in their capacity as Gmail users / recipients of email?
- are people consciously talking about the problem in other communities?
- given the high percentage of people using Gmail, would it be reasonable to take countermeasures, for example, when somebody registers for an event, refusing to let them use a gmail address and giving them a link to a page with more details about the problem?
- is there any particularly good web page we can point people to explaining the Gmail problem and giving them a concise list of alternatives so they can migrate quickly?
Regards,
Daniel