The Georgetown University Mail Services Department has been sending conflicting and delayed messages to students about the status and location of their packages, making it difficult for some students to ship packages to campus at the risk of never receiving them. 

Some notifications from the mail department are informing students of package delivery and expiration simultaneously, posing challenges for students trying to retrieve their packages. 

Students are supposed to receive an email when their package is ready to be picked up, beginning a 30-day period before the package is returned to the sender. But lately, some students have received faulty notifications.

The lack of accurate communication caused problems for Chloe Kim (COL ’25) when shipping her contact lenses so that they would arrive shortly after she returned to campus Jan. 4. 

The Georgetown University Mail Services Department did not email Kim to notify her that her package had arrived until Jan. 18, ten days after it had actually arrived, and the university does not allow students to retrieve packages without an email confirmation. By then, the mail department claimed it had already returned her contacts to the sender, she said. 

Kim had to order contacts again — this time to an off-campus location — to ensure that she would receive them on time and that they would not be sent back.

“I woke up to an email saying that my package had been in the Leavey locker center and that it had been sitting there for two weeks and was about to expire and that I had to go and get it,” Kim told The Hoya. “I frantically rushed there to go check for it, and it wasn’t there.”

A mail services employee acknowledged the recent package notification problems and told Kim to go to the mail distribution center in the Leavey Center Ballroom. 

“He redirected me to the ballroom and said they were having issues with the locker bank in general and that it has been sending out a lot of faulty messages about expired packages and late notifications for packages that have been delivered already,” Kim said. 

She ultimately found her package at the mail distribution center in the Leavey Center Ballroom.

The lack of accurate messages about mail delivery is especially difficult for students who, like Kim, get important health care items shipped to campus. 

“It was frustrating because I had paid for overnight shipping to ensure that I would have them as soon as I got to school and then I ended up getting them around 10 days later,” Kim wrote in a follow-up message to The Hoya. “I also had added frustration because my contacts are a key component of my life.” 

Genevieve Domenico (MSB, SFS ’23) faced similar challenges when recently trying to retrieve her package.

Domenico received six consecutive emails from mail services — the first two of which had different time stamps, indicating they were not sent when they were supposed to be — within one minute of each other Jan. 18. The first set of timestamps was set at 2:38 p.m., while the remaining emails had a timestamp of 8 a.m. The first two emails informed her that she had a package ready for pickup in one of the locker banks, while the next four said her package had expired because it was not retrieved on time. 

“I had no chance, no opportunity — no notification that it was actually there in the locker room until after they kicked it out,” Domenico told The Hoya. “All those emails that would have let me know came the same time the email that it was expired came.”

The messages did not include information about where to retrieve the expired package, which can be confusing when waiting for multiple packages, Domenico said.

“They didn’t say if they were sending it back, nor did they actually explicitly say they were sending it to the Amazon room,” Domenico said. “The only reason I knew they didn’t send it back was because I did get the second email from the Amazon room with the same tracking number. Otherwise, I genuinely would not have known if it was there or not.”

The university resolved two issues affecting package delivery on campus, one of which was a temporary connectivity issue affecting notifications for packages in 24 of the 550 lockers across campus, according to a university spokesperson. 

The spokesperson said that the only packages returned to the senders this academic year — with the exception of packages with issues such as an incorrect address or a damaged label — were those received during the fall 2021 semester that were unclaimed as of Dec. 20. 

This is not the first time that students have expressed frustration with receiving packages from the Georgetown University mailroom. At the start of the Fall 2021 semester, the Georgetown University Mail Services Department received 3,000 packages per day, causing significant delays between arrival date and the date in which students could retrieve their packages; however, an influx of packages is always common at the beginning of the year. 

According to Domenico, it can be risky to mail important packages to the university given past delays and faulty notifications.  

“I genuinely tell my parents never to mail something important to Georgetown,” Domenico said. “It’s not worth it because it’s not a secure system to mail money or personal information.”