Today in “Google Broke Email”

Comments

• Zak@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  He’s being a bit whiny here. He was having employees use Gmail as a client for his self-hosted POP mail, which is a niche use case that likely has a brittle implementation and doesn’t make any money for Google. Gmail offers a paid product for this kind of use case, but it won’t integrate with the rest of his (likely custom) automation. He wants to self-host parts of the system and have Google do the messy bits, but he’s not their customer and probably isn’t a very good product either.

  He then complains that to solf-host IMAP:

  My server is now responsible for storing all of their messages, including all of their spam. It is a vast amount of data. I will have to implement quotas.

  It’s 2025 and that’s a silly claim. A 12Tb HDD costs the same as a couple bottles of booze, and it’s not hard to write a script that clears out spam after 30 days. The other complaints are basically UX.

  Normally saying a small business owner should self-host IMAP and write scripts would be a bit unreasonable, but this is JWZ.

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Also his claim that email chains end up creating an extra copy of an attachment every time? That’s not how most email clients handle attachments. They usually only carry forward in forwards.

    And even if his idea is true for his setup somehow, data deduplication at the storage level isn’t particularly difficult to set up, and I would argue is table stakes for any business doing self hosting.

    Similar when it comes to data retention policies.

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  • Triumph@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not to mention that he's complaining about an SPF record for his own domain. Dude, change your SPF record.

    I think this is a case of "knows enough to be dangerous".

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think this is a case of “knows enough to be dangerous”.

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

      At Netscape, he developed the Unix release of Netscape Navigator 1.0,[4][5] and later, Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or Usenet reader) to natively support HTML.[6]

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    • asret@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s not his SPF record.

      The forwarding he’s talking about isn’t the same as you hitting forward in your mail client.

      SPF only authenticates the first hop from the origin MTA. If you put a relay server in then you either need to disable SPF checking on subsequent MTAs or implement RFC8617. If you don’t then when subsequent MTAs check the original sender’s SPF it will fail because the message came from your relay.

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    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Agreed. I said it elsewhere, but despite his technical knowledge, he appears to be a terrible admin, one that I would only being on as a junior if I was hiring.

      I’ve met (and been) this admin before, and a lot of the time it’s because they stepped up, are learning on the job, and don’t know what standard build/tool chains are. But when stuff breaks, it always ends up sounding like this blog post

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    • eleitl@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Dude, it’s jwz. You can assume he forgot more than you know.

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• wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is awful, but while I see the huge impact for personal users, I’m not sure I see the business case for his current setup. I’m sure this will inpact business setups, but his specific use case just seems off.

  He really buries the lede about why the weird setup of why address@businessdomain.com (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from businessname_address@gmail.com (to my mind a misused personal email) in the first place. It’s down in the comments:

  Image

  You can’t be serious. Especially for a company he runs, this is silly. Just tell them they have to use the business domain for business email. The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.

  With his current setup Google is already accessing all his company mail data. I don’t really get his objection to having the MX record directly route to them at this point.

  I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.

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  • TheRealKuni@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I have a personal domain I use for email, with an address set up as firstname@lastname.family

    Most people understand this just fine, but sometimes forms don’t work with .family as a TLD. EVERY NOW AND THEN, though, someone cannot comprehend an email address that doesn’t end in Gmail.com.

    When I arrived to have some work done on my car recently the person on the phone had recorded my email as: firstnameatlastname.family@gmail.com. Like, the actual word “at” was in there. I had never said anything about Gmail. And when I corrected it after arriving at the shop, their form had no issue with the .family TLD.

    I think some people genuinely don’t understand that Gmail and email aren’t synonymous.

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    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      First Na Meat eh? 🍖

      Honestly I don’t think I’ve even heard of the .family TLD and im a tech worker.

      I’m not surprised that a gear head autocompleted it in his mechanical brain to something completely else. Maybe he’s been replaced by AI.

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  • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.

    It’s a bar.

    I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.

    The post makes it sound like he has a bunch of automation he likely wrote himself on incoming mail, but he wants Google to do some messy parts (spam filtering, archiving, providing a nice client). Google has no reason to want to continue doing that for him and the handful of other people doing something similar.

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  • asret@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think it’s more about making things easy for his employees. His comment is just recognising that they already have personal gmail accounts so he’d like to allow them to use the same client for work email. Data privacy doesn’t seem to be an issue for him.

    I do the same thing for my mail - rather than juggle between accounts I can just select from a dropdown which account to send as, and I see all my mail in one inbox.

    His setup is complicated because he’s doing additional processing on the incoming mail for his domain - he can’t just hand it over to gmail, he wants to relay it. And because SPF breaks mail relaying he’s been relying on a workaround - he’ll just move on to implement RFC8617 instead now (assuming that gmail supports it - it’s still listed as experimental).

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    • DV8@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Honestly if anything he should focus on creating a solution where he can have DKIM active. He has dmarc and SPF, but not DKIM.

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• rmuk@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This guy reminds me of an asshole I used to work for. The company was called ABC, say, so he set everyone up with ABC-Alice@gmail.com, ABC-Bob@gmail.com, and so on. He got really, really pissed off when ABC-NewStarter wasn’t available to the extent that he wrote non-stop emails to the person who registered it, Google, his solicitor, even the police demanding it be relinquished and moaned non-stop that the world wasn’t bending to his whim.

  I’m not supporting Google - it’s annoying that they’re revoking a feature - but this is a real XKCD 1150 situation.

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• roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Really they closed a loophole that allowed him to have Enterprise level email features for free.

  I sympathize that none of the paths forward are ideal, but when you use loopholes (especially ones that store your employees passwords in plain text???) expect things to eventually break.

  You used a bodge to make your life easier, now the bodge is broken and you have to pick up the pieces.

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thank you, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his setup seemed like a convoluted way to have Google handle the storage at no cost to himself. Glad I’m not the only one with that takeaway.

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    • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, they wanted storage and enterprise level spam filters for free and used a bodge to get it. Google probably stopped that feature because they weren’t the only company doing that. I doubt the average consumer account was costing them much in that department.

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• Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just going to start this off by saying I have little to no sympathy for this guy’s situation.

  While the situation does suck (and this is how I found out I’m losing this feature too), we can’t really be surprised that Google is finally getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT. Eventually, security must move forward and ditch laughably insecure methodologies, and this does mean peoples’ workflows will get broken. But if we kept bad shit around because removing it negatively affects someone’s workflow, we’d never get anywhere.

  And on topic of the article, this dude is sitting in a pool of shit of his own making. From the comments:

  I’m not “sticking with them” in any way, it is that my staff are statistically average humans and therefore their preferred email addresses end in gmail dot com.

  I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin. Being the company IT guy means making internal tools available, making them easy enough to use, and making people use it. He says that the staff is “statistically average”, which means they should be smart enough to use a company mail service and not facilitate his users to use a free 3rd party service to kludge shit together.

  One of the gigs I was at used Kerio Connect as their self hosted email solution, and you know what? Even the below average users could figure it out without having to hook into a Gmail account.

  This dude is trying to bubble gum and duct tape his orgs mail flow with below sub par methods and complains about it breaking, all because he couldn’t be bothered to push back and not hook their company email into Gmail. Don’t be surprised you’re in a circus when you’ve got clowns running your infrastructure.

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  • eleijeep@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT.

    GMail has supported POP3 over SSL for a while now.

    LERMwOdwJuSPYDb.png

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    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s moderately better, but that’s just slapping a bandaid on an open wound. POP is still a garbage protocol that should be depreciated, even when you wrap it in SSL.

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  • tux0r@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin.

    FWIW, just to avoid Dunning-Kruger and because I think you are mistaken here: jwz

    I can only assume that he has rather hand-crafted scripted workflows though.

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    • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Programmers often make the worst admins.

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    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Like I said, dude knows his stuff. But I admin for a living, and if I worked with him, I’d be giving him 7 flavors of shit daily for these kinds of decisions.

      These things work for small shops and small teams, but they don’t scale well and just lead to this kind of headache. And it’s awful for everyone who needs to help support it. And I know that, because I’ve been in those shoes more than once (and on both sides of it).

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    • DV8@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Being good in one thing doesn’t make you good in something else. He is an inexcusably bad IT admin. The devs I work with don’t ask for my opinion on code and if they would, it would probably sound nice to someone who doesn’t know shit, but it’d still be a dumb opinion. Likewise I don’t ask for their opinion on how to create our IT infrastructure (beyond of course asking their requirements for testing servers and such). If they have an opinion on it, it’s generally not very coherent or founded in reality. Like the complaints of this guy. Though they’re generally not this dumb.

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• hummingbird@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Who in their right mind would channel all his employee email through Google? That shit gets scraped the hell out off.

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• unmagical@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Here are some things that people will suggest that are unacceptable:

  Have the dnalounge.com MX record point to some Google thing and let them take over 100% of my company’s email. Fuck no. Also it wouldn’t integrate with our internal systems, store, transactional emails, bounce processing, etc.

  Why is that unacceptable? “Fuck no” is not a reason for it being unacceptable, and having to build out integrations when things change is part of the job.

  ---

  You want business email? Well you host it yourself, pay someone to manage it in house, or pay someone to manage it externally. Using loopholes to get free end-user emails was bound to stop working eventually; just pay for Google workspaces, keep the same familiarity for your employees and now have heightened control over how Google uses your data.

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• Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Dude needs to pay for google workspace instead of using Gmail.com for his employees.

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah, didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that detail was quite absent from the blog post.

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• chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  TIL you can add IMAP and POP3 to Gmail to import your email.

  Why would anyone with another email service WANT that? Do you like giving Google even more data than they already have on you?

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  • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I have this setup for “historical” purposes. Back in the day, freemailers gave you very little space. 20 MB or so. And if you wanted to mail several people, there were always two or three whose mailbox was full. That is something you’re not seeing anymore and Gmail is the reason for that and that is also the reason why Gmail became so successful. Gmail gave you 1GB (?) of space and you never ran into those problems again.

    And it was a convenient way to switch accounts. Just setup Gmail to fetch everything from your old hotmail account and don’t bother with checking that one every few weeks so that it doesn’t get full and you might miss important mails.

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    • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Gmail started at 1 GB, which was massive compared to anything from 1-20 MB at most hosts, and they made a point of storage per account growing over time until they jumped to 10 GB

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  • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I still have gmail polling my old hotmail//live addresses, and it’s been that way since the day I signed up. Back when the slogan was still “Don’t be evil”

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• brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t even use gmail professionally and I was still using that.

  Some (terribly implemented) services don’t allow changing e-mail on their accounts, and I have stuff I subscribed to aeons ago with a mail I am not using anymore.

  Not that I can’t connect directly to that old crappy mail provider, but it’s very inconvenient.

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  • DV8@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But us that problem caused by Google or by the objectively worse service that won’t allow you to change your address?

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• hamid@crazypeople.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Google removes functionality from their email client” not “Google broke email”

  Just use a real email client or roundcube if yo u want a web client. Trusting google for your business is an obviously bad decision.

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• kazerniel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Google never thought to email their customers about this?? Why tf do I have to learn about this 2 months after the announcement, from social media…

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  • LagFlex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Bro but AI

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• raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  People using gmail in 2025 have no one to blame but themselves. Google backs a fascist and pedo-criminal administration.

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  • gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine

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    • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Which means they're actively backing fascists and pedos.

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well - it is entirely opportunistic, which makes it evil by design, even if they were backing good people.

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• DV8@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What a damn moron to both have this setup and the audacity that it will stop ‘working’.

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• M0oP0o@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Well fuck, I have a day to figure out my own solution then. And if I did not see this, I would have had zero notice. Likely would have missed emails and not known why.

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  • tux0r@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’re welcome, I guess.

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    • M0oP0o@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Its not like you googled up the place like fucking google did

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• purplemonkeymad@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  He needs to use a mta that supports arc sealing and setup his Google workspace to accept the arc from his server. Pretty sure Google also supports connectors for email so he could even just have Google accept all emails from his ip. I suspect he is cheaping out and doesn’t want to pay Google for a business grade service.

  I don’t care what he did in the past, it is obvious he is not an up-to-date email admin. Using free consumer accounts as your primary email, is not a defendable position for anyone other than the self employed.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  JWZ is probably one of the better people in a position to set up a commercial mail provider that provides whatever services and address the issue.

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• synae@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Forget the content, I was just surprised to see a local music venue on c/technology

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  • Hasherm0n@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If you’re not already familiar, the owner of the DNA lounge is Jamie Zawinski.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

    He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.

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    • synae@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ya know, I think I’ve heard something about it being owned by a tech guy before, but never really looked into it. Thanks for the info.

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• palordrolap@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Frankly, I'm surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn't already have his own mail server. It's not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.

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  • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.

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    • DV8@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You forgot to add that he obviously refuses to hire an actual IT admin to do IT admin stuff.

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  • tux0r@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think his reasoning about why not is rather understandable.

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• Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Jesus christ my eyes are bleeding. What the fuck is even that?

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• mcv@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Can’t you redirect that email at the DNS level or something? Email for my domain get redirected to different mailboxes, which I can configure at my registrar.

  Although personally I’d take this as a perfect opportunity to move away from Google entirely.

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wack

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