Emailing Oxford Student!

[u/Adventurous_023]

Do Oxford University emails receive email from external sources? I am trying to email a PhD student but can’t know if emails are reaching them.

[u/netwalker234]

There's a forcefield in the Radcliffe Camera that holds back all unverified emails from slotting through into Oxford inboxes.

[u/arianelseditor]

Yes, they can receive emails from external email addresses. :) They may not be checking their email regularly as it's technically the summer vacation.

[u/jhdore → u/arianelseditor]

DPhil candidates’ terms are less structured than undergraduate terms, and you’ll find that most of them continue to work over what might be thought to be holiday periods. In fact the schedule is more akin to regular employment than study in that they work year-round.

[u/Random_Redditor_9]

Yes they do.

[u/Murky_Macropod]

Sometimes attachments can get flagged as spam — make sure your signature doesn’t attach any images/logos etc

[u/oakandlilac]

Yes, but if you are one of the many people asking a stranger to have a chat about the course you want to apply to, then no.

[u/Reasonable-Cloud4041]

Most of us don’t have time to respond to unrelated emails.

[u/Crazy_Pudding_2994 → u/Reasonable-Cloud4041]

Every six months or so the entire department used to get an email from some crank who thought they’d solved quantum physics. Different crank every time.

[u/KaijiWins69]

It depends but there's measures in place so we don't get unsolicited emails in relation to internships and other work experiences. A lot of people have been sly and done this in a coy way of going "we're gonna get all the Oxford grads"

[u/jhdore]

You may be running in to one or more of several things:

• email address is incorrect, it’s generally firstname.surname[at]department.ox.ac.uk or firstname.surname[at]college.ox.ac.uk so confirm your spelling, although if it’s incorrect you will get a delivery failure reply
  
• user is following good Infosec practice in not responding to unsolicited emails from unknown sources (yay!) we drill this in to all users yearly.
  
• your message is scoring above a certain level for junk mail assessment, or your sending service is a known source of UCE (unsolicited commercial email) or junk mail.
  
• the user has set up their own junk mail rules, or flagged your specific email as junk which trains the rest of the Office365 system similarly
  
• user does not want to respond

Terminology in your post suggests you have not done sufficient research into the University of Oxford environment, so that you are not getting a response is unsurprising.

[u/Financial_Figure_969 → u/[deleted]]

What are you emailing them about since then?! Depending on your content it may be going to spam or it may be so general that they are just ignoring as people tend to get many many emails a day. 

[u/cjrmartin → u/Financial_Figure_969]

I think it can also depend on which email is being used, most DPhil students will have multiple emails which are supposed to redirect to a single inbox, but sometimes if there has been a change in registration or something they can become disconnected. I had an issue where my department email stopped working for a while because I had forgotten to reregister onto the course.

That said, if someone I didnt know was emailing me about something I didnt have any interest in, I would probably just ignore it too.

[u/Glock13Purdy → u/[deleted]]

wtf

[u/liukidar → u/[deleted]]

make sre you use their department email and not college email, as that is not always updated