Gmail was bouncing emails for a Community of Practice listserve for a few hours on 25Jul2025, before retracting that change and allowing the emails again.

No idea what triggered that episode but Gmail does not like listserves.

When I have subscribed my gmail address to a listserve, and trained listserve emails as Not Spam, new emails came into the Inbox, not the Spam folder.

However, lots of other people have said that their spam training did not work for them.

And there is no way to contact support for help.

Gmail is free to use and the advertisers pay the bills.  

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

My suggestion is to use an email service that listens to you, even if you have to pay for it.  Fastmail, Runbox, etc.

As a knowledge worker you need all the information you can get, and you need to have control  over platforms that bring you that information.

It's a cost of business to have a working email address.