
Never Send Your CV via Gmail - jason_price
https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-never-send-your-cv-via-gmail-b4fddd35fb3e
======
slg
This entire article is premised on an excuse from a single HR person that an
email ended up in their spam folder. It is probably worth keeping in mind that
"your email ended up in spam" does occasionally happen, but it is also a
widely used polite white lie that people use instead of saying "I ignored your
email."

~~~
jdm2212
This is the real answer.

------
jdm2212
The article says that the issue was on the recipient side, not the sender's
side, so the title is wrong -- sending via Gmail is fine, receiving via Gmail
is... well, supposedly an issue, but I've never had a resume land in my spam
folder so I'm skeptical.

(Amusingly, my Google job offer landed in my Gmail spam folder years ago. But
that was because of a weird thing where forwarding from my @university.edu
account would screw with headers that Gmail uses to verify the authenticity of
an email.)

Also...

> They must be using Gmail client to access their office emails, I guessed.

Is that even a thing? Does Gmail reroute stuff to spam that came into your
inbox via POP/IMAP?

~~~
abathur
I agree that it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with how he sent it.

I wasn't aware of a feature like this, but a quick search turned up
documentation for an "email quarantines" feature in G Suite
([https://support.google.com/a/answer/6104172](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6104172)).

I do get mail received over POP from another account in my spam folder, but I
suspect it doesn't explain this quarantine behavior.

I'm not sure if a G Suite email user can add a private email over POP/IMAP,
but I would be a little slack-jawed if they could AND their personal mail
could get pulled into the organization's quarantine?

~~~
jdm2212
The quarantine docs you linked make it look like this is configured per-
customer, so if the author's email did in fact get quarantined, its because IT
configured it that way not because of a Gmail bug.

Also:

> For a quarantined inbound message, the intended recipient receives no
> indication of the message unless you release it for delivery.

So the recruiter wouldn't even see the email in their spam box. It just
wouldn't exist as far as they can tell if it was quarantined.

~~~
abathur
I wonder the same, yes--it's just what I found for trying to figure out what
they might even mean by quarantined in the first

It wasn't super clear to me (at least, on a quick read) what the recipient
would/wouldn't see if they were given permission to admin quarantined mail, if
the mail eventually got released from quarantine after someone realized it
wasn't crap, etc.

------
janwillemb
Summary:

> Author applied to multiple positions via email and was not hired. He
> suspects this has something to do with his resume ending up in the spam
> folder on the other side, who use Gmail.

If this was a problem in an application I was debugging, I would highly
mistrust this theory and dig deeper to find a more probable cause.

------
morisy
Having been on both side of the hiring fence, many HR departments primarily
pass around PDFs when evaluating candidates. If you instead, as suggested,
include a link, I think you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot
because when you're evaluating dozens or hundreds of candidates, anyone who
makes you take an extra step is very easily lost in the shuffle, even
inadvertently.

The spam filtering tools can indeed be frustrating and even dangerous; the
answer is to find a way to cordially confirm receipt and make that a practice.
I switched away from Gmail to another dedicated email provider and found even
more of emails were getting sent to spam, with no real recourse for
diagnosing.

~~~
bdamm
Yeah email is a train wreck now. The right answer is to use all the mediums.
Gmail, link, and follow it up with a phone call/chat/etc. The resume email is
just one arrow in a small flight of arrows.

------
knorker
The fact that this so called developer doesn't understand the difference
between a sender and a receiver of email makes me think there are other things
in the CV that caused them to not be hired.

~~~
jszymborski
Understanding Gmail's spam/quarantine policies (which was both the
sender/receiver here) is not really relevant to engineering roles, unless
maybe you're on the marketing team.

~~~
knorker
Seeing a system and getting somewhat of an accurate understanding of how the
parts work is, though.

And it's not like "email" is some esoteric thing he's only now come into
contact with.

For example, don't say "GMail". This is about email. To misquote Babbage: "I
am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
provoke such a conclusion".

This conclusion screams of not being able to understand the logical effect of
a known fact. I wouldn't want this person troubleshooting anything, for
example.

And I didn't see many comments about the rest of his statements. It's a mess.
He seems somewhat angry at GMail's suggestions (this would be on the sender
side) because sometimes he doesn't want to say what GMail suggests. Again…
confusion of ideas.

Actually, now that I think about it I'm seriously suspecting this was written
by a bot. More articles than you'd expect are written by bots, and this is
close enough to making sense (on multiple points), but without an _actual_
logical point, that it's a possibility.

~~~
jszymborski
Gmail is decreasingly an email client an increasingly a protocol. Gmail-to-
gmail messages get treated quite differently, and ultimately OPs conclusion
that gmail intercepted their email because it determined that CVs are
suspicious is correct.

I would add that I think it's a bit fickle and unkind for internet strangers
to pass judgement on a person's ability to do their job based on a post like
this. This individual did not ask for our opinion on their ability to do a
job, but instead gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client handles
CVs.

~~~
knorker
> This individual [...] gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client
> handles CVs.

That's one way to see it. To me it was about as coherent and thought through
as someone yelling and on the corner about 5G towers causing coronavirus.

------
mips_avatar
I had a different gmail hiring snafu happen to me. I was applying to jobs, and
my offer for an onsite interview at Microsoft was filtered to spam by gmail. I
was also applying to google at the time, so I joked that google was being
jealous and wanted me for themselves. Thank goodness I checked my spam that
week, I now work at Microsoft.

------
mrlala
What a weird article.. first of all, what does _sending_ it with gmail have to
do with anything?

He says the company is USING gmail to receive.. that's where the spam-filter
comes in. He could have sent this with any service and it still would have
been filtered out.

Then he complains about gmail auto-complete? First, I have found it to be
quite helpful.. but next, if you don't want it to autocomplete then you just
keep on typing. Yeah sometimes it might try to correct a specific word.. just
like everything else these days. It's not always going to be perfect.

For someone who is apparently trying to get such a tech job- not understanding
the email filter was on the receiving end and he would have hit the same
situation no matter what is... quite disturbing. Especially after going
through the trouble to write an entire article about it.

------
unilynx
Spam filtering is (mostly) on the receiving side. You have little control over
whether or not the recipient is on Google mail. It doesn’t really matter if
you send using gmail, and it might be even better for deliverability given the
reputation systems in spam filtering

------
tyrion
I do not understand, why we put emails in spam folders instead of rejecting
them (as some providers do, e.g. mailbox.org, posteo.de). It may seem weird at
first, but at least if something important would end up in Spam, the sender is
going to get a notice.

~~~
slg
The same reason we shadowban people or give vague responses to incorrect
passwords guesses. You don't want to give bad faith users information that
makes their job easier. Telling spammers whether their emails were received or
not would be incredibly valuable in interrating ways around the filters.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Does that really help, when the spammer can make their own email account on
the target's email service (eg. Gmail), send the spam email to this email
account and see if it gets through the filter?

~~~
slg
I don't know. Although I would be mildly surprised if there was a single
universal spam filter applied to all Gmail accounts. I would also think there
are more inputs to the system than just the sender and the body of the email.
Gmail being so big allows other variables like the rate that address is
sending to all of Gmail as well as how users engage with those emails.
Therefore getting a single test email through the filter probably isn't proof
that you have defeated the overall filter.

------
united893
This is patently incorrect. The author doesn't have any idea on how GMail's
email filtering works.

~~~
jdm2212
Particularly given that the author thinks the _sender_ is responsible for
_recipient_ -side spam filtering...

------
whorleater
Wait I'm confused, are they _not_ sending around a pdf file for their resume??

------
blueridge
I am wondering what happened to paragraphs?

This one line one sentence style seems to be popular on Medium.

But there is no rhythm. There is no flow.

Each sentence must have started on separate index cards.

Why wouldn't you weave them together?

So much white space, so many long pauses.

Do people enjoy reading this kind of writing?

~~~
dan_can_code
I would much rather a paragraph. But these days, I see spelling errors on some
of the most popular news publication websites and have just come to accept
that the quality of writing online is diminishing.

------
lozenge
It doesn't matter what mail client you use, the issue was at their end

------
ianmf
Another less known fact is that gmail blocks zip files/archives that contain
executable extensions, scrips, or encrypted filenames. I few months ago I
tried sending a document that contained my PII and I was unable to send it
because gmail couldn't determine the content inside the archive. This feature
that should have a on/off option IMO.

[0]
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en)

------
ekanes
Interesting point. Later in the article, Google Hire is mentioned. The article
was written in February (Medium redacts the year) and in Sept Google Hire was
sunsetted.

------
tdy721
Write it in docs, use a template. Attach a pdf to the email.

That being said, if phone numbers are spam, I’ve been typing my phone into
email signatures for like ever when I need to.

------
dan_can_code
I have sent my CV containing both my phone number and email address to various
companies and have never encountered this problem. I don't think the PDF
containing your personal information was the problem, but potentially the
individual dealing with your information.

------
floren
Good news if you're concerned about Google's Hire product: it'll be dead by
September ([https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/))

------
Fred27
I recently had gmail putting my outgoing email in my own spam folder rather
than sent items. When I've checked I've found that the recipient has received
it but it's really odd behaviour.

------
AnonC
TL;DR version: Sent CV by email and Gmail put it in the recipient's spam
folder, which cost this person an interview (the position was filled by the
time this was checked). Then the post goes on tangents about Gmail and Google.

Forget about a CV, I think it's impossible to say which of your emails to any
Gmail recipient would even go to their inboxes. Gmail has a very aggressive,
as well as stupid, spam filter. I've seen emails go into spam even after
adding an address to my contacts list and marking mails in the spam folder
from some contacts as Not Spam.

When it originally arrived, Gmail really revolutionized how web based email
ought to be done. Now it's just a bloated and buggy mess that has managed to
get a very large user base. I shudder to think how (paid) GSuite accounts also
lose genuine emails to spam.

------
diebeforei485
Perhaps there should be an interstitial when loading Gmail if there are items
in your spam that you haven't seen 1-2 days after receiving them.

------
victor9000
You can send your resume as a flat PDF to avoid this problem.

~~~
claytonjy
Is it really that easy? I see no mention of _how_ the author sent their
materials, but a directly-generated PDF is just as easy to search as a word
doc, isn't it? Does gmail explicitly only inspect the latter?

~~~
snapetom
Unless the PDF is generated as one big image, making it a _tad_ bit harder for
google to scan, yes, PDFs are easily parsable. There's a ton of open source
libraries out there for it.

------
paypalcust83
Mail it to them in a legal-sized envelope on dead tree carcasses. Harder to
ignore, they'd print it anyhow for candidate finalists, and virus FUD is a
non-issue. Send them an email copy as a backup or in-case they need an
electronic version too.

