Making Sure You Receive SERC Email

Whether you've signed up for an email list hosted by SERC or have a SERC account and want to reset your password you'll need to be able to receive emails sent to you by SERC. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts some of these emails can end up incorrectly marked as 'Junk Mail'. In some cases these messages are invisibly deleted by your local email system and never even show up in your 'Junk' folder. This page provides guidance for you, or your institution, to ensure that email from SERC gets through.

Add SERC to the List of Senders that Shouldn't be Marked As Spam

Most email systems provide a mechanism where you can indicate specific email sources that should never be considered Junk Mail (Spam). If you add SERC's information onto your list it will greatly reduce the chance that future emails from SERC end up in the Junk folder. The exact details vary depending on what program you read your email through and what email service you (or your institution) uses. Here are some examples for common email environments. Your local institution's tech support folks can also likely help you set this up. The key detail to know is that all SERC email will come from the serc.carleton.edu domain and more specifically the host mg.serc.carleton.edu. In most cases you can add this address to your email client so that our mail isn't marked as spam.

Microsoft Outlook and Office 365

Add @serc.carleton.edu to your safe senders and safe recipients lists

Gmail

Create a filter for @serc.carleton.edu that prevents it from being marked as spam

  • Open the Gmail website from your computer
  • In the search box at the top, click the 'sliders' icon on the right that opens the search options.
  • In the From field, enter: @serc.carleton.edu
  • At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter
  • Select Never send it to Spam
  • Click Create filter

For Other Email Environments

Ask Your Institution's IT Department to Fix the Problem for Everyone

At many institutions there are multiple people who receive email from SERC. In these cases it can be more efficient if the central computing organization who runs the campus email service makes a global change so that all SERC email gets delivered rather than marked as spam. In many systems this is possible. Here are some instructions:

Whitelist our domain (serc.carleton.edu) with:

More Information for your Campus IT Folks

Here is some more detail about SERC email that may be useful to share with your campus IT department so they can understand why they might want to whitelist our domain:

SERC (https://serc.carleton.edu) is an office of Carleton College that runs a variety of grant-funded programs to improve science education. As part of our work we run a large number of email lists that faculty in our programs use to communicate with each other. We also send emails related to accounts faculty sign up for within our system (e.g. to share their professional work). All the emails SERC sends are opt-in communications and related to the non-profit work taking place in these academic projects. All our mail is sent via mailgun'smail service and come from the serc.carleton.edu domain. We send over a million emails each year and have no complaints from our community about our email being 'spammy'. We have never been blacklisted and a follow all standard best practices (valid SPF and DKIM, unsubscribe links in all emails, etc...). Despite this we find that many of the faculty we work with find some emails we deliver for them--often communication between colleagues at other institutions about projects they are actively working on -- get incorrectly marked as junk. In some cases email systems are accepting messages from us and then deleting them in ways that are invisible to individual users (i.e. the messages aren't routed to user's Junk folders). This problem is most acute at campuses that use Office365 for institutional email. Since we often work with multiple people at each institution we find it's most effective to have our domain allowlisted for the entire campus, rather than rely on individual faculty members knowing about the problem and successfully whitelisting our address. So we (and the faculty at your institution who work with us) would appreciate your adding our domain (or our mail host mg.serc.carleton.edu) to a campus email allowlist so that our emails don't get incorrectly marked as spam. If you have questions feel free to contact Sean Fox (sfox@carleton.edu)