How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
iamnotaprogrammer.com
i.e. beware creating an email black hole.
iamnotaprogrammer.com
Matches: -96f0f0036730a7d970a678e8f933e8b7
Do this: Never send it to Spam
Matches: is:spam
Do this: Never send it to SpamFilter searches containing "label:", "in:", "is:", or stars criteria (i.e. "has:yellow-star") are not recommended as they will never match incoming mail. Do you still wish to continue to the next step?
It's slightly bizarre that the email forwarding you can configure in settings would not skip all spam checks, and not even indicate as much.
How does the appearance look? You send e-mail to foo@business.com and then funkyjizzbeats20@gmail.com replies to you! What could be more professional than that?
Also, what about security? How would people feel to know you've forwarded an e-mail they sent to a business account to your personal account? Is this just something no one thinks about?
I don't think it's a violation of trust to have mail forwarded from one account to another account on the same provider. Email does not have an implied amount of security or privacy. Sending email is like sending a postcard--Anyone involved in its transit has the opportunity to read it.
But there's a workaround for that, see my other comments on this thread.
This leaves no evidence of your personal account, even in the headers.
I have a lot gmail account, but only one of them is on the gmail domain name, so that hadn't come up for me.
Mostly, it's worse than a postcard. It'd be like if every letter carrier makes a copy of the postcard, then is supposed to discard theirs once the next person has their copy. There is zero guarantee that any of the several copies were actually discarded, and it's highly improbable that they were erased securely by any of the intermediates.
Knowing that the messages are transmitted in plain text across at least two mail servers (often more), and across several intermediate ISPs, it is ... unlikely... for an informed person to have an expectation of privacy in email.
Encryption solves all these problems, but we all know that's not in mainstream use. Not even signing!
Your comment about security is extremely disturbing. You're right people can intercept it, however, if I send an e-mail to someone at a company and they forward it to their personal account, that's the minute I stop doing business with that company.
I get the appeal of combining them, but it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
Read underwater's comment as well. He has some good points.
> ... it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
My defense of the "many inboxes forwarding to one" scenario was not meant to cover every perceivable scenario. Obviously I would not advocate it in all situations and many situations would not be appropriate for that. If someone does not set it up right, I am not trying to defend that sloppiness.
An example of a good fit: someone who works part time at several companies, or the sole proprietor of a few businesses. If mail goes to CEO@ABC, replies are from CEO@ABC; mail to CEO@XYZ is returned by CEO@XYZ. If all of them are on Google Apps for Domains anyway, it is not a big deal, it's not less secure, and the owner of the e-mail address has less authentication and security overhead. Note that if you are mixing providers, like google apps and self-hosted mail, it gets much more complicated. In that case you are altering the physical security of that data.
Examples of bad fits: customer service, sales messages, bug tracking, official company broadcasts, and many others.
Regarding underwater's comment: obviously if the e-mail does not belong to you, you should not forward it somewhere other than the owner's server without the owner's permission.
Re-reading my comment, I should've mentioned that a shared mailbox is only appropriate in some cases.
If you configure your GMail account correctly, it will reply via the other account's own SMTP servers. There will be no evidence of your private GMail account, even in the headers. (This is not the same thing as just configuring GMail to set a particular "From:" address.)
> Also, what about security?
If both accounts are hosted by Google, then unless you're doing something stupid with one of the passwords they're pretty much equally secure.
If your business account has privileges within the app domain, you might actually get a security benefit by not being logged into it all the time. Kinda like not being logged in as root all the time.
And then you need to enter the username, server, password, etc for the other account, which can even be another GMail account.
Not to mention that in the case of a lawsuit you might be required to give access to relevant emails. Mixing personal and professional accounts could quickly get messy.
If they're simply creating something to make some extra money then sure you could use the same account, but to be taken professionally you should keep them separate.
This is a terrible practice. Work mail will be full of confidential information which shouldn't be mixed with your personal files, especially after your employment ends.
Matches: -{"X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*"} Do this: Skip Inbox, Forward to XXX, Delete it
Your other GMail account will take care of the spam that gets forwarded.
I've been doing this for more than a year, with nothing ending up in the account's Spam folder.
It's designed to be automatically flagged as a virus, without actually being a virus. I found this with a simple Googling; you can too!
But hey, it's at the top of HN, so it must have worked.
On Oct 99, 2012, at 3:33 PM, KrakensDen yawped:
The real annoyance is Outlook. If someone responds to that email via Outlook/Exchange, the reply will be sent `To:` your main email address rather than to the address you sent with.
If you forward a filtered set of emails (if that's even possible in gmail) then you presumably know what you're asking for.
My work Google account goes in an incognito window, personal Google account goes in the standard window.
I've found this works really well, and the different colors help my mind remember which environment I'm in.
Another fun one was clicking on Google Docs links. It rarely was using the right account and allowed me to go forward. Usually got the "Please request access to this document" message.
>You can actually sign in to multiple google accounts and switch between them (at least for email / docs - not analytics / other services). I can't remember exactly how to do it, I think you need to enable multiple sign in on the account first.
Haven't looked into the profiles. Speed of switching would be the most important thing for me.
If only HN had mods, who could perhaps edit linkbait titles.
[1] "So what I realized is that I had made a fatal mistake by forwarding my email" [2] "But, I’m not trying to blame Google for this"
Edit: Also, the title doesn't blame Gmail either. "How to use Gmail..." implies that it's something you the user can do not something Gmail does.
Matches: from:(*)
Do this: Never send it to Spam, Exclude from SmartLabel categorization
First I login to: https://mail.google.com/
Then I login to https://mail.google.com/a/domain.com
Works great if you do it like that, better than if you try clicking "Switch accounts" or whatever.
And I just checked my spam folder and found three legitimate emails. They were from Linked in, glassdoor and HBO. Google really needs to improve.
edit: Make that Udacity as well..
You see, I signed up for many Linkedin groups and then realised that they were sending me too many emails. I removed all of the emails in Linkedin and then found that this would take at least a week before I stopped getting the emails. I waited two weeks, the emails had not stopped and so I classified them as spam.
The issue is that Google is using collaborative filtering, which will tend to weight such emails more highly as spam given that I and others have noted them as spam. Its normally quite effective, but you do need to check your spam box quite often. This isn't because the algorithm doesnt work, its just because of noise created by people using the spam button inappropriately for your use cases.
Hotmail email forwarding has this same issue, but only has POP access, so you can only access the inbox without the web interface. You can tune down the aggressiveness of the spam filter to a minimum (but not turn it completely off).
Only when you decide that someone is both important and trusted, have them use that email address.
HN has an international audience. While the word retarded appears to be common in the US it's an offensive slur in other parts of the world; especially the UK.
Please, I'm not telling you not to use it, but I am gently asking you to consider using some other word instead.
"Steven Hawking is retarded" == offensive
"The design of this chair is retarded" == inoffensive "Bob is so gay" == offensive
"That chair is so gay" == probably still offensive
Perhaps it's a generational thing. Are you young? (Less than 35?)
> I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way
I have no problem with people saying "This decision is dumb" or "This decision is stupid" or "This decision is idiotic". I do have a problem when people say "This decision is retarded" because that's not general stupidity, it is linked specifically to people with learning disabilities.
The goal is to ask people to consider using words that are not recently (even currently) used for learning disabilities. Retard has strong links with learning disabilities. Enough time has passed that words like 'moron' has little connection to its original meaning.
In time retard will have enough distance from its current use to be less hurtful.
>I don't see another word with the same connotation as progress.
I don't understand.
Is it just a difference of degrees? I mean both are cases of "factor outside of individuals control -> (extremely) low intelligence"
Thus, someone with a chromosomal disorder, or someone who was deprived of oxygen during birth, or someone who is just stupid because of genetics all have learning disabilities. They just have different forms of learning disability.
Yes, everything in the protocol leads to the fact that nothing should drop an email unless it has passed responsibility of it to another server which has accepted the message.
In practice, lots of times things don't work.
Is it possible that someone people might like to use their native SMTP capability for low volume noncommercial email? Does every person who sends email have some overwhelming urge to send spam? Such that we must place pseudo control over sending email, any email whether commercial or noncommercial, in the hands of "email providers"?
Good on you for running your own service.
Is it cheaper for you to get a static IP from a VPS than from your ISP?
That's not what they're saying.
"Very many spam emails come from people running an email server on a dynamic IP. Some companies were happy to host spam sending companies, and would put them in dynamic ranges so they could continue to get money from those spam sending companies and keep changing the IP address. The ratio of good email servers to bad email servers on dynamic IPs is so poor that blocking all dynamic IPs is, unfortunately, the only reasonably solution".
You can be on a dynamic IP and send email. Just don't send that email from a server on a dynamic IP.
Email could be even more decentralized than it already is in practice. This could potentially make spam far more difficult.
Reading that quote (from SpamHaus?) two things come to mind:
1. We are entrusting the rules on our mail delivery to someone who begins sentences with "Very many" and lacks the attention to detail to spell "reasonable" correctly. Make of that what you will.
2. The "problem" is not the existence of "bad email servers" on dynamic IP's, it is the lack of "good email servers" on dynamic IP's. Why the heck aren't the millions of people on dynamic IP's using this capability? Answer: They do not know it exists.
To "replace email", we do not necessarily need to fundamentally change anything about how email works. What we need to do, perhaps, is replace the people controlling it and instruct "good" people how it works. As it stands, in general, the only folks who understand how email works are a. email providers (e.g. ISP's), b. spammers and c. spam fighters.
If the vast majority of email sent directly to recipients from dynamic IP's was low volume and noncommercial, the "bad apples" would be overshadowed by the good ones. And so would the anti-spam zealots be overshadowed by reasonable people who just want to communicate with each other (not necessarily trying to sell ED treatments to the whole of humanity).
Education is the way forward. People arguing against any sort of consumer education on something so basic as internet messaging are an interesting spectacle to behold. Their attitude should fuel the fire of anyone working on this "dangerous idea" of "replacing email". You know who you are.
It's not a quote from spamhaus. It's me re-wording your text.
> Why the heck aren't the millions of people on dynamic IP's using this capability? Answer: They do not know it exists.
No. Millions of people have no interest in running their own email server. What benefit do most people get from running their own server? (Where most people are those who have one or two email addresses, which they use for a couple of hundred contacts.) What benefit do small businesses get from running their own email server, rather than paying someone else to host the server?
> If the vast majority of email sent directly to recipients from dynamic IP's was low volume and noncommercial, the "bad apples" would be overshadowed by the good ones.
You clearly have no idea just how many spam emails were being sent. Something like 90% - 95% of all email was UBE. Much of this was sent from botnetted machines, and many of those would have been on dynamic IPs.
> anti-spam zealots
Conversation is fruitless if you attack the people who have the same aims as you.
> People arguing against any sort of consumer education on something so basic as internet messaging are an interesting spectacle to behold
But you're not suggesting to educate people on internet messaging. You're suggesting that people are educated on installing and maintaining a mail server.
What is an "mail server"? At its essence it's just a program that listens on a port for an incoming or outgoing message. Then you have programs for storing, delivering, forwarding, etc. And maybe you have perceived issues of being able to handle lots of messages. But you don't necessarily need all that if you are not providing email for other people. What if you're just a casual user who wants to send or receive a message to/from your friend? If I have an email daemon (or a "service" in Microsoft parlance) listening on a local port, I can type some text and "hit send" (or whatever method I choose to send the text to the daemon) and the mail is sent. No email provider needed. If the recipient has her email daemon listening for messages from my IP address (and only my IP address), she gets the message "immediately". There is no third party email provider. This is how email works.
There is also no spam if we do it that way. Her daemon is not open to the whole internet. It's only open to me. Why is this so baffling?
Neither third party email providers nor some rule that "no one wants to run an email server" or "no one should run their own email server" are a part of the email protocol. Those are your observations of what people have done so far and your opinions. They do not set limits on what can and cannot be done. Are we in the business of startups and trying new things or are we here to preserve status quo?
Email is internet messaging, one of the oldest forms of it. Email is a message sent in a specified format* over the internet. What could be more simple?
*Granted the format is rather rigid, but it's not too difficult for anyone to learn. It's like writing a business letter.
Millions of people have an interest in sending messages to each other over the internet. And millions of people have no interest in sending bulk email for commercial purposes. That's all I need to know. A project is born.
There is a need for an "email replacement" as many others have voiced and as pg identified in his list, but I'm afraid it's not going to come from anti-spam zealots. I appreciate what they try to do, but I do not appreciate their mindless, blunt-force methods and ideas about "good guys" and "bad guys".
There is an enormous amount of bulk email sent every minute of everyday. Just because it is "opt-out" doesn't make it any less impersonal and unwanted (or any less of a huge drain on the world's computing resources). Can we accept that some people have little interest in receiving bulk email, and that there may be a market (besides you) for email inboxes that are not open to marketers, but only to known contacts? Alas, that's not what the anti-spam zealots aim to address. They do not want to curb bulk email. They just want to stop certain senders.
This does not really move me toward my vision of email. It's just the same old thing. An inbox full of garbage.
Considering the majority of spam these days is probably sent through botnets, that's a pretty good assumption.
It would seem to degrade the usefulness of EC2 for anyone wanting to run their own mailserver.
Spam has lead email to basically become this closed ecosystem. If you don't use one of the already established major email providers, ISP's or domain name registrars the reliability of email hits the floor.
Consider the idea of running a mailserver than only accepts mail from a predetermined set of sending addresses. What would be the chances of receiving junk mail?
How is this functionally any different then blacklists? That's just a whitelist instead. So instead of new mail severs "quite likely" being on a blacklist, they are definitely not going to be on a whitelist.
And no, it doesn't matter if isn't a smart idea when you aren't in a position to change anything. Even if you have a perfect technical solution to the problem, you still have to convince every existing major provider to adopt a solution that isn't even a direct problem for them.
I'm afraid there's no need to convince any provider of anything. At this point, Alice and Bob are sending and receiving email without the need for any third party "email provider".
Functionally blacklists and whitelists are the same. They both have the same goal. But they are not the same in their effect. Blacklisting an entire netblock to stop one bad IP address affects many IP addresses who do not need to be blocked. Whitelisting a single known IP address does not have that side effect. For Alice and Bob, handling their own messages may be a desired option. Of course, not everyone may follow Alice and Bob's example. But who cares? The population using email is enormous and diverse. The point is that if someone wants a better solution than what "email providers" offer, she can get it.
The problem to solve is how do you have a fixed address where anyone can contact you, spam doesn't get though and you don't have to maintain personal black/white lists. This is what email currently provides. Granted, the spam part varies depending on the provider.
If everyone had a fixed address with a mail server running, "lookup" i.e. simple MX lookup, might be possible, e.g. if your IP address is 1.2.3.4, anyone could send mail to inquiries@[1.2.3.4] or something like that. But I'm not sure that alone really solves the problem.
Email still works without a worldwide directory. People exchange email addresses and they keep lists of them known as address books.
You claim it's not a closed ecosystem, but it appears to be totally closed and locked off. The only way to get access to it is to be invited in.
> The point is that if someone wants a better solution than what "email providers" offer, she can get it.
Not if they want email.
It's starts closed and it is opened by invitation. Yep. That is exactly how it works.
If you cannot understand that approach, then that just means it's not how you think. It does not mean that the approach makes no sense or has zero utility.
Maybe a stupid analogy can be made if we pretend "Facebook" is the internet (of course it's not, but it does present a messaging system so play along for a moment). On the one hand you could make every Facebook user your "friend" and thus able them to send you messages, and then when people abused that privilege - and we know from experience some would - you could block them. On the other hand, you could only make a select number of people who you know and trust your "friends" and thus only give a select number of people the privilege to send you messages. Chances are, they won't try to sell you Viagra.
On the one hand there are times you may want to enable the entire network to be able to send you messages. On the other, there are times you may only want to allow a small subset to send you messages. Not sure about you, but I don't receive important email from all that many different people. People's social circles are only so big. There is a certain carrying capacity beyond which it becomes unmanageable.
You argue against block listing, but then suggest blocking the entire Internet except the few people you want to send you email.
You say that only people who you have given your email address to should be able to send you email, and then you say there should be a lookup system to get email addresses. (But what's the point of the email directory system if you can't send email to someone because they haven't white listed you yet?)
> but I don't receive important email from all that many different people.
Eh, depending what you mean by "important" I do receive a lot of important email from lots of different people. My email addresses have been used on the public Internet for many years, and I've had a lot of communication to those email addresses, and those communications have brought me great joy. And I also have a variety of people who email me about work related stuff - I won't have prior knowledge of those people.
I think I'm missing something about your system. Please, is it something that you already have well planed out? (Even if not in a state that can be deployed yet) Or is this something that you've just started thinking about?
So long as you're not suggesting Challenge Response we can have a discussion about it.
Discussion is great. But you have to read carefully to understand what's being said. (If I am not being clear, then I apologize.) But if your mind is closed then there's no point reading what I'm typing because I am not regurgitating the usual ideas on email.
Anwyay, discussion is irrelevent when juxtaposed against running code. I'm interested in stuff that works more than getting approval from people in online forums.
This is not some new thing. Anyone can use email this way now. We all have good connections and bandwidth. There is no need for store and forward. What has stood in the way of using email as direct communication is people who can only see email being used one way: daemons that accept commands from any connection, spoofed IP's and all, and email as a service run by someone else, not a small program on the client's machine. If it was impossible to authenticate connections based on any other means besides real-time challenge-response, or DNS run by someone else, then how would people manage to run ssh daemons without the same problems as email?
For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP.
From the blacklist operator's perspective, the broad effect of the block is intended to cause headaches for a ISP as a form of punishment for allowing outbound spam. Our deliverability (and many others) was just cannon fodder for that fight.
If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?
Not the type I'm interested in.
> For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP.
You replied:
> If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?
That solution introduces a bunch of problems: you're running more software that's open to the Internet and thus introducing insecurity; you're asking people (who might not be technical) to install and run software and use a different mechanism when they want to communicate with a subset of users.
The other solution is to just ask the people that you're sending email to, but who are using a whitelist / block list to add you to the white list or exclude you from the block list.
I do not understand your last sentence. Didn't he say his ISP is blocking outgoing mail? The recipients are powerless to unilaterally change that situation.
Think about this for a moment. Forget the corporate example. Imagine one user has a daemon listening for mail (no setup, it's all been set up for him:- it's "built-in" to his OS). Imagine there is an authentication method e.g. a shared secret and perhaps even some obfuscation like port knocking to hide the open port. Even assuming a determined spammer can get past this, is it worth his time? He will reach a grand total of one user.
We can even use a small overlay, where the IP addresses are private, not routable on the internet. The spammer needs to get into the overlay network first, again defeating things like shared secrets or perhaps private keys to identify machines before he can even get a shot a access to a listening mail daemon. That's not easy to do if the users stay logged in. And again, if the network is small, with a few hundred users or less, maybe only a handful, is it worth his time?
You're basically proposing a whitelist solution, which has many known problems: it does not scale well; it does not handle new or unexpected email partners; it relies on the simultaneous cooperation of all parties; etc. In this particular case it also relies on spammers remaining ignorant of the new port for SMTP--which seems unlikely.
Then we are free to do our SMTP of other messaging as we desire. Each connected machine can choose what ports it wants to listen on, if any.
And what if this does not need to scale? What if it's only being used for a small group of people? What if all the people know each other? A very specific but very common use case. Not everyone is a celebrity with a gazillion "friends". Nor is everyone constantly conversing with new acquaintances. Some people have old friends and family. So I've heard.
Is it worth the spammer's time to try to find an SMTP daemon for each indivdual email address? Under the current system, things are centralized enough that a spammer can spam hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of recipients via sending to a single SMTP daemon.
Spammers have to send enormous amounts of spam to be successful. Having to do extra work to find an SMTP daemon just to send email to one recipient, and have to do this repeatedly, seems like it would not be worth a spammer's time. At least, not when it's so easy to just spam people that are using email the usual way: allowing some third party to handle their mail.
People chose whether or not to use a block list. Thus your problem isn't really with the person creating the list, but with the mail admin choosing to use that list to filter email. That person feels it works for them.
Very few people should run their own mail server. Email is, now, toxic. Spammers pretty much destroyed email; especially the ability for people to run their own servers for sending.
For a history of a (perhaps overly vigorous block list) look at SPEWS - spam prevention early warning system - which had a few honeypots and which happily blocked large ranges. The Usegroup news.admin.net-abuse.email has very many threads from innocent blocked users and wingnuts screaming "change your ISP!!"
Spammers did not destroy the protocol or well-designed email servers and clients.
"Very few people should run their own email server"
That mindset is why we have a problem, in my opinion. We have actively tried to prevent people from learning.
The history of block lists is a history of the failure of the "email provider" (i.e. "very few people should run email servers") idea. Of course, anti-spam is a career for some people, so "failure" is relative. They've succeeded in trying to exert control over a common internet capability, for profit.
The internet began as peer-to-peer. There was no "DNS". And there were no "email providers". Everyone had a responsibility to learn how to use the network and the basic services it could provide e.g. messaging. Then some people got some bright ideas about how to make money. "Spammers" were not the first ones.
Enjoy that spam in you inbox. It is the product of ignorance.
There's a reason that people running servers at that level (from that time) are called BOFH.
> (from that time)