No "Daily Show" for "The Daily"

As per one reader's (read: Abby's) request, supported by positive feedback for my last post (on the subject of the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" by Jon Stewart of the "Daily Show"), I submitted an edited version of my work as an Op-Ed to Tuft's newspaper, aptly named the Tufts Daily.

My submission was sent late Monday night; the reply came Tuesday afternoon: We will be aiming to publish your work in Thursday's paper. Fantastic! All I needed to do was write back, verifying my graduating year, major, and the originality (and unpublished-ity) of my work.

My exact reply:

Year: 2014
Major: Undecided

This has been adapted from my original Blog post on the subject. Otherwise, I have not submitted or published this work through any other publication.

That was it. I waited, and Thursday morning opened the paper to find...nothing. I checked each page; no Op-Ed. I check online; no Op-Ed. I searched their online database for all articles with "sanity" in the text. A few turned up, but not mine.

Did they change their mind? Or had I been mistaken; did I have the wrong date of publication in mind? I decided to go back to the emails and check.

Nothing was wrong; they said Thursday. What was it, then? That's when I noticed the small, faded message at the bottom of the conversation: "1 deleted message in this conversation. View message?"

You see, not long ago I was suffering from a plague of undesired emails from "Major: Undecided," a comedy group on campus. There was no way to unsubscribe and I had gotten sick of asking them to take me off their mailing list (no no avail). Therefore, I created a Gmail filter, that is to say, a rule for my email account: Any forwarded emails containing "Major: Undecided" should be automatically deleted.

Let us return to the story at hand. The Daily, in replying to me, had left the previous conversation material attached to the end of their email. In other words, there was a "forwarded" email in their reply containing my message to them, which contained, by odd coincidence, "Major: Undecided." Therefore, Gmail had deleted it.

The Daily's reply had been sent Tuesday. It read:

Posting it in a blog still counts as publishing. Can you please give me a link to the blog post? If it is significantly different than the blog post it might still be ok to run.

I don't know which is more depressing: that my filter prevented me from seeing this in time to do anything about it, or that sharing my purely original writing with friends and family disqualifies it from being shared with the Tufts student body.