Since the move from Google to Microsoft, multiple student associations have noticed increased difficulty when trying to contact members by email. According to Sigri Hoekstra, Chair of S.K.V.B. Primo Ballerino ‘one of our members sent me a text message that our emails came in her spam folder. She also heard that more associations have problems with this.’ Hoekstra continues that she has ‘not heard if more of our mails ended up in spam folders’, but did warn members to ‘check their spam folder’.
This appears to not be an isolated incident. ‘For one of our events we've heard some people didn't get our email’, says Wouter Stoter, Treasurer of S.A. Communiqué. ‘A lot of emails have ended up in the spam already.’
‘No insight of the scale’
Furthermore, student library association Bellettrie has also had issues. Karola Neeleman, Secretary of Bellettrie, explains. ‘The main problem is that a lot of association mails end up in the spam folder rather than the normal inbox for student mail addresses. Since a lot of our members use their student mail for associations, and they don’t check their spam box a lot, that cuts off a lot of our communication.’
Neeleman adds that Bellettrie has suggested members to switch to a different email for association business. ‘But not a lot of people have done that’. For instance, Bellettrie uses email to send reminders to members when their books are getting close to return time. These emails not arriving can cause problems. ‘We know that there is a problem and that people may not be getting our emails. And because of the way the spam filtering works, we don’t really know to what extent those members are still seeing our mails. It’s really annoying because we have no insight of the scale of the problem and there isn’t much we can do to fix it.’
GDPR conflicts
Given these issues, why make the change from Google to Microsoft? According to Henk Swaters, head of Demand & Supply Management at LISA, there were ‘privacy related issues’ with Google. ‘Another reason is that collaboration between staff and students becomes easier’. LISA had been planning to move away from Google for a while due to GDPR conflicts, says Swaters. And Microsoft was high on the list of candidate replacements, ‘Because of Teams integration: one environment makes it much easier to work together.’
When asked if LISA was aware of the issues students were having, Swaters replied that initially ‘there was a problem, but it was fixed’. However, this was a problem with the filter not being sensitive enough, whereas the associations are struggling with the filter being too sensitive. LISA had not heard of association emails being stopped by the spam filter.
Update (22-02): 'issue resolved'
According to Swaters, the issue with the spam filter should be resolved now. 'The problem was that both the Microsoft and SURF mail filters were active at the same time.'
