Sergio Tennenbaum (Toronto) writes with a useful reminder:
Some departments seem to be sending job candidates' letters of recommendation by email to the head of the search committee. I don't know if these are supposed to duplicate hard copies of the letters or not. But at any rate, I have already been sent some of those, and in two cases the files ended up in my junk mail folder. Since not everyone is judicious about searching through their junk folder, I suspect that, if this is a common phenomenon, many of these dossiers will be lost. For all I know, I am the only one whose junk filter has behaved in this manner, but I imagine that a job candidate dossier has many of the phrases that triggers junk filtering. Not knowing how widespread the problem is, I don't know whether it makes sense posting about it, but I thought it might be worth mentioning it to you.
I suspect this is happening a lot. The U of Chicago certainly has an over-active spam filter, and at least once a day one or two genuine messages (usually with big attachments or that are very long or that contain embedded links) end up in my junk mail folder (which I always check prior to emptying). I can see how large attachments, like dossiers or letters of recommendation, would also get wrongly picked up.
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