Following up on our earlier item, a grad student on the job market writes:
I received an email from my department's placement assistant today notifying me that she had been unable to get my letters to a search committee. The search committee had requested that all documents, including letters, be emailed. When she emailed my letters, the email bounced back with a notification that the mailbox is full.
This is particularly worrisome, since a full mailbox typically just rejects new emails, and so the search committee will presumably have no record at all that an attempt to deliver the letters was made on my behalf. I have no doubt that I'll be able to clear this up with a phone call - and I will. But for those candidates with less deft people handling their letters, this might have been a real problem. Adding to the number of variables in this process - by, e.g., requiring documents to be emailed - increases the risks.
I appreciate that search committees want to save candidates money by not requiring them to print and mail documents. But that's not worth the risk (to me, anyway) of not being able to complete my file and so not being considered for a job. Search committees that want to receive all documents by email need to ensure that they won't let this happen. One way to do this would be to set the account up via mail software that automatically downloads the mail to a hard drive and deletes it from the server. That way, there is no danger in using up one's space on the server in question. Or they need to be assiduous in printing the materials and deleting the email attachments promptly.
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