Hacker News Reader

Comment by javagram | Hacker News Reader

I pay yearly for G Suite to avoid this issue by using my own domain instead of @gmail.com. If I ever had an issue I can change my email provider (also backup email regularly using Takeout or in the past using offlineimap).

Unfortunate that it’s necessary but I think it’s a good idea for everyone who can.

View on HN

How does G Suite help here? If you've just got your own domain, you can do the same thing without G Suite.

I presume he wants to use the gmail tools.

I realize I've never checked if my Android GMail app supports using my other address as the From address. I guess it doesn't.

I don't use GMail's web interface but prefer an actual mail reader which has no problem with using a different address. Maybe I should use an IMAP mailreader for GMail on Android as well.

You have to use the Gmail web page to set it up, but it is possible to use the Android Gmail app to send from non-gmail accounts. The 'From' field becomes a drop-down allowing you to choose from the accounts you have set up.

I'm assuming to use all the google apps like Gmail. But in the case that Google suspends you, you can redirect your mail elsewhere and not be locked out from any other accounts.

The person in the bug post lost access to their email address. Just think of how many services you have tied into your email address. How many of those accounts would allow you to recover without email access?

By having G Suite and your own domain, you get to port that domain to another email provider if something bad did happen with Google.

But how is that different from simply having your own domain and sending email for that domain to your GMail box, and redirecting it somewhere else once you need to get rid of GMail?

But how do you send email from your domain? Last time I looked (a few years ago admittedly) you could set a reply to address but your email still clearly came from your gmail address.

I'm not using GMail's web interface. My mailreader (Apple Mail) allows me to select from which address I'm mailing.

Admittedly this doesn't work from my mobile GMail app, but I don't send a lot of work-related email (which my alternate address is for) from my smartphone.

Admittedly I haven’t used gmail for years now but from what I remember when I used to do this this is half right. If you change the From address in gmail, it will add a ‘Sender:’ header with your gmail account on it. Some clients will show that combination as the email being from ‘X on behalf of Y’ where Y is the from address and X the sender address and some will send replies, especially bounces, to your sender address. It may also set off some spam traps. I think it might also have required some form of verification that you have access to the address in question.

If you want to send from a different address without the sender header being set to your gmail account, I think you have to have Gsuite.

I just looked at the headers from some emails I sent this way. My gmail address does not appear there and both the <From> and Return-path are my domain address.

Thanks. Looks like they fixed this quite a while ago and now either you can verify an account after which it will accept your From header (and the web and app UIs let you select that) or, if you haven’t verified the address then if you send an email through their SMTP servers it will rewrite the From as your gmail address and sets a new X-Google-Original-From header to the address you put in the email originally.

I just tested it and it does work from the Android Gmail app.

How? I just checked and couldn't find it.

You have to have added the other email addresses from your Gmail web page first, under Settings, Accounts and Import, Send Mail As. It will ask you for the server address and credentials etc.

Then when you compose a message from either the website or the Android app, your From address is a dropdown containing the addresses you set up.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

I have it set up so that Gmail sends the mail through my domain's server. The <from> field is my domain address, and my gmail address does not appear anywhere in the header.

I've had it this way for a long time, but I believe it was optional and it's also possible to only read the mail from the domain but send it via gmail.

If you have GSuite you@yourdomain.com is your gmail address. yourdomain.com's MX records will be pointed to Google.

This is different to the various techniques, such as IMAP/POP and forwarding, used to get them@theirdomain.com email (actually hosted elsewhere) into a theirgoogleacct@gmail.com mailbox

The biggest thing you're missing out on is Gmail's spam filtering.

If you get a lot of spam, you can always use something like SpamAssasin.

You can't afford the Lamborghini? Here, try this Fiat Panda. They're both Italian cars!

Hyperbole but not by far. Google's filter is trained on billions of messages a day, tuned by their own systems and by other users. It's the single best selling point for hosted email. Nothing compares when you've got that sort of volume.

I've had about three spam come through in the past year and they've all been personally addressed, non-bot but unsolicited marketing emails. I have three catch-all domains in this account.

We used to run our one domain through a passthrough service (at the cost of hundreds of pounds a year). Gmail was always right, easier to correct and by the point you're paying per-user (not per address), much much cheaper.

Google is also a domain provider

But you still lose access to your entire life up to that point.

Sure, you can start to rebuild without changing your email address, but it's no less catastrophic when you get locked out.

Another assumption might be paying for Google services warrants better support in case of an issue.

I used the G Suite basic account in the past ($6/month), I was able to get a support ticket responded to within 24 hours. The issue got resolved by someone before their support team responded to me via email, but I was still happy an actual person got back to me.

It's been said many times before, but it's best to pay for stuff, even (and especially) when you can get a good product/service for only ~$5/month.

You normally have an admin super user account as well as your normal one. The admin account can do anything to the normal account. Also has access to support, which is pretty quick.

Do you use Google Drive or Docs to store anything critical?

Can you expand for a scared dummy like me? Is your email infrastructure currently a gmail backend that you can hot-swap with any other provider?

If you have your own domain name for your email, you can point it at any host's servers. Google in the case of Gsuite or Fastmail or Pobox or anyone else.

If you have regular backups, all you have to do is change a DNS record to switch to a different provider and you shouldn't lose any email in the process.

This is what I and many others do. I have had the same email address for ~20 years and have had it hosted on at least a half dozen providers over that time with no loss in data.

not the person you're responding to, but I have G Suite and I have my domain pointed at Google for mail. If for some reason Google came down hard on me, I could login to Namecheap and setup email to be handled by another provider (Microsoft, ProtonMail, whoever). So if someone emailed me at my email address, the only gap I risk is between the last time I read my emails and when I setup the new provider. Added bonus, "forgot password" on various sites will continue to work at this stage and I don't have to mass email people that my email address is now name@domain.tld.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com