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This newsletter is a roughly fortnightly production, with two newsletters every month. Some people sometimes ‘complain’ that they haven’t received the latest newsletter. This is nearly always because your email provider has put it somewhere other than your main Inbox. This note explains why that happens and what you can do about it.

Why does it happen?

Some email providers, notably Microsoft/Hotmail, appear to be positively hostile towards newsletters. When in doubt, they often put newsletters into your spam/junk folder.

Other email providers, notably Google/Gmail, set up multiple inboxes for you in addition to your normal primary inbox and then often put newsletters into one of these secondary inboxes rather than into your primary inbox.

What does Google do?

Google has this weird approach towards Gmail email addresses whereby, as a default on your phone or in your browser (but not when using normal email software), it divides your Inbox into four separate folders, namely Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.

When anyone sends you an email, Google’s software automatically reads that email and decides which of the four boxes to put it into. With the newsletters, Google sometimes sends them to Primary, sometimes Promotions, and sometimes Updates.

Some Gmail users don’t read the emails that are put into their Promotions or Updates folders because, as a default, your phone or browser often only shows you the contents of your Primary inbox.

There is no method to Google’s madness here. I (Guy) have spent hours sending myself test emails and they get placed in the various inboxes at random. This happens regardless of the contents, timing or method and therefore I can’t do anything to control it.

What you can do about it?

Try any of the following.

1. In whatever software you are using to access your emails, you can turn off all the inboxes other than the primary one, which then forces Google to put all emails (other than spam) that are sent to you into your ‘primary’ inbox, which then becomes your only inbox (other than spam).
2. You can look in your ‘promotions’ or ‘updates’ inboxes, find one of our emails and move it into your ‘primary’ inbox. With a bit of luck, Google will then ask you where it should put future newsletters from us and you can answer “primary inbox please”.
3. You can add my (Guy’s) email address (guy@nillumbiku3a.org.au) to your address book. With a bit of luck, Google will then starting putting the newsletters into your primary inbox on the grounds that I am known to you.
4. You can click any link in any of our newsletters (or reply to any of our newsletters) and then, again with a bit of luck, Google will understand that you actually want to see our newsletters and will start putting them into your ‘primary’ inbox.

There is no downside to doing any of the suggestions above. If you want to do one of them but can’t work out how, give Guy a ring (0411 520 850) and he will talk you through it. An alternative approach is to start looking at your Promotions and Updates folders – who knows what goodies you might find in there in addition to some of our newsletters.