Oh dear oh dear. ..
I noticed that Gmail was applying the ‘Junk’ filter to a lot of valid emails. Many of them seemed to be just newsletters, but I was also disturbed that it had also filtered emails from my own family, my Media Socialist mailing list buddies and other good friends whose email addresses were in my Address book.
Tonight I went through my Junk folder in detail. Imagine my horror when I saw an email from [Adam Greenfield](http://speedbird.wordpress.com/), author of [Everyware](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321384016/vantan/), asking me (and any other Singapore readers) to [hang out with him](http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/do-i-have-any-readers-in-singapore/) at Changi when he was in Singapore.
He emailed me in Sep 2007, which was LAST YEAR!!!
This is so embarassing. I just sent Adam a note. I really loved his SXSW presentation on ubiquitous computing. I gave it a full 5 stars. Despite attending lots of panels at SXSW for 3 years in a row I’d still say his was the most mind-blowing presentation because it represented a tangible and exciting new future and I learned the most from it.
My job in Health Promotion would also have been related to some of the examples he gave in his presentation and it would have been marvelous to have met with him.
The question now is, how did Gmail apply a Junk filter which I never asked for?
I suspected it was my syncing Entourage for Mac with Gmail’s IMAP … however I did a timeline check and Gmail only launched its IMAP service in Oct 2007, a month later. By right, all emails sent via my Contact form on my website, should appear in the Inbox. However it and many others were marked as unread and in Junk. From that period onwards I noticed a few other emails sent via my Contact form had somehow landed in Junk too. I still can’t figure it out.
One thing worse than having email overload, is not even receiving important emails in the first place!