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I've run my own mail server since before Google (yes, there was a time...), and I'm having similar problems. Right now I'm in the middle of a job hunt, and email from me (even to people who have already emailed me) is ending up in spam folders. It is infuriating.

It is also apparently unfixable. Regular people cannot inquire as to why mail is not getting through. And amazingly, even having friends at Google does me no good here. I'm told that the anti-spam team is so mysterious and opaque that they won't even talk to co-workers about this.

It's maddening. I get why Google grew up with absolutely no conception of customer service. (It's hard and expensive, and not necessary for their business model. Chicken farms don't have customer service windows for the chickens to lodge complaints.) But their apparent utter indifference to the problems they are creating for other people is maddening.

Do you have the various auth headers setup on for your mx records? I have to go through that ordeal occasionally when setting up outgoing emails for sendgrid or mailchimp campaigns. There are some things you can due to reduce the likely hood of mail being auto flagged as spam although in a lot of ways it is out of your hands.

https://www.mail-tester.com is a great tool for testing this.

Ooh, that is nice. Sadly, I am at 10/10, so I still have no explanation why GMail hates me.

I know this may sound extortionist, but one solution is to use an email-as-a-service, like Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Mandrill. All of these services offer the first few thousand emails free. They perform spam filtering on outgoing mail so they are trusted by Email Service Providers (ESPs).

(Full disclosure: I'm an employee of Mailgun)

Ideally, we'd all be able to send and receive email on our own servers, but due to the fact that the vast majority of email traffic is indeed spam, it is an unfortunate reality that the big ESPs have to be extra-cautious about it. Additionally, they need to make the decision whether email is spam or not instantaneously, so mining customers' previous emails is not an option without dramatically increasing the size of their infrastructure for this task.

It is possible to send email from your own server; you need to follow onerous industry-standard practices, like using a dedicated, known IP that has a certain amount of increasing email volume, known as "IP warming". After a few months of constant interaction with an ESP, your sender score improves. Unless you're sending massive amounts of email, the cost-benefit ratio isn't in your favor to use this method.

Having had delivery problems to gmail for years, I couldn't agree more.

However Yahoo are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to delivering email. If they decide you aren't their friend, they send back an error code with a URL in it to go and visit and identify yourself via a web form that is reviewed rarely by some humans. Then if you fuck that form up or if they don't like you, blackholed for 6 months and they stick their fingers in their ears. Try telling a yahoo user about this as well and it's "meh".

Email is broken unless you have a small provider or DIY and it's fucking frustrating.

I had that experience with Yahoo. I sent a single email to my brother whom has an account on Yahoo with SPF, DKIM, and not in any blackhole files. I received their 421 response "All messages from x.x.x.x will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed." and my only recourse was to fill in a "bulk email prioritization form" I was not sending bulk email and was thus denied for that program (nobody read my explanation that I am NOT a bulk mailer). It took over a month of contacting various channels to get them to take my mail.

I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity.

I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.

I really think this used to be a problem. Why anyone in their right mind would even consider using Sendmail these days, is beyond me. I use exim - because I've used at work, and it's default in Debian -- but I'd generally recommend either postfix, or probably openbsd's opensmtpd (it's in Debian unstable). It's not really that hard, AFAIK no sane distros will set up an open relay out of the box anymore, and that's really all there is to it. Assuming you're serving less than a thousand users or so (eg: one user ;-).

Might want to set up greylisting, though, to curb incoming spam.

Yahoo are an absolute pain in the ass. My last dealings with them were from shortly before Marissa took over, I don't know if they've improved or worsened.

What succeeded for one client was my posting pflogsumm stats showing delivery rates and times for Yahoo vs. numerous other large mail providers, along with proof of SPF and DKIM support, to all the Yahoo C-level (and several lower) execs, indicating that they had a problem, and I'd been attempting for months to resolve it.

Apparently there's a Yahoo "concierge", and we managed to get onto the company's approved senders list shortly after.

That said: email's a pain in the ass, and I do know for a fact that that particular client was failing to scrub known dead recipients (as in: the domains no longer existed). Some fights you just concede....

When I was being recruited by Google I was frustrated by having great phone calls with recruiters, doing well in my phone interview and never hearing a followup.

Turned out all the emails from @google.com were going into my Gmail spam. I think they still do (no matter how many I've marked as not spam).

Oops.

I've been waiting for an email from a company that I'm in the recruitment process with and your comment inspired me to check my spam folder. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have seen an email from a government agency looking to recruit me. So thanks!

You'd think .gov, of all TLDs, would have a lower spam score.

The domain is likely to be legit, but there are no special guarantees about the security of the mailserver.

It was actually .gc.ca, since I'm in Canada, but still.

Follow up call: "So, I notice your spam team needs needs some more engineers".

"This is about directly replies from me to people I have been emailing for months all of a sudden ending up in their Google Spam folder"

Yup same exact thing. Just the other day I sent my wife a few links from my business email account @company to her @gmail and it ended up in her spam folder. And I have been mailing her for longer than a few months as well.

In other words google does not differentiate it appears on whether you have an ongoing relationship (email wise) with the person that you are sending an email to as if they are just looking at the mail message and nothing else.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop.

Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.

Is your amazon account on a personal domain e-mail address, forwarding to your gmail?

Apparently forwarding can sometimes invalidate the SPF or DKIM [1] depending on the settings involved.

[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en

Amazon mail works fine for me.

But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.

That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.

It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

> It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa...

I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.

It's as if they intentionally want to force their filter on you. Not that there's anything wrong with a server-side spam filter. One that puts a polite X-Spam-Score header so you can adjust the sensitivity client-side.

Looking at the contents of my spam folder, and knowing that they likely reject many more e-mails in the background, I'm pretty sure I'd drown if I ever tried to use such option...

add a filter. From: *@amazon.com -> never mark as spam.

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.

Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.

It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.

I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?

I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.

Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.

No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?

> When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?

Never because my grocery store isn't a website.

OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?

The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.

Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.

My grocery store gives me a printed receipt when I pay for my groceries. And I don't ask them to do that--they just print one up and hand it to me.

Amazon can't give you a printed receipt because you are not there, physically. So they send you an email instead.

This is not that hard to understand.

Stores don't give you receipts for your benefit. They print receipts to make sure the cashier isn't dipping into the cash register.

Card processors require retailers to provide transaction receipts to cardholders.

Every time I order groceries. Then again my grocery store is online.

To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more.

(And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.)

Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.

This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help:

1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons.

2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to.

For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour...

so... sorry? :)

Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.

it should be opt in instead of opt out then shouldn't it? maybe you should be directing your passion at those who feel opt out is appropriate.

And that's why I said: "but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first."

If you signed up, then you opted in. Don't be lazy and mark things you signed up for as spam. I'm not understanding how people get email from Amazon that aren't customers, and how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations, which I know is possible, because I have.

> how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations

I'm a customer, I consider that opt out. You don't? I signed up for amazon, not their bullshit emails. That you consider the situation opt in shows they have you trained well.

Nice, ad hom, and I can't downvote your insulting comment! How about this: are you too lazy to uncheck a few check boxes? Because that's all it takes, and then you'll only get order and shipping confirmations.

You shouldn't be insulted, I said you were trained well. Yes, I am too lazy to opt out of spam that should be opt in. Lazy like a fox.

Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it.

That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.

Speaking as a person who frequently buys from Amazon, I've never experienced this. (No, it's not that promotional email from Amazon is going into my spam folder. I have to check my spam folder semi-regularly because gmail keeps flagging perfectly legitimate email as spam.) The mail I get from Amazon is order confirmations and a newsletter that I specifically signed up for. What's this promotional email that you're talking about?

http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY

of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.

And if you open any of them, there is a convenient link to unsubscribe from them:

http://paste.click/fOAtyL

Are you saying they are opt out? because I think that is what you are saying? Way to miss the point.

No I'm saying you opted in, and can now opt back out.

didn't!

I can't help but notice that all of those come from amazon.co.uk. As evidence-free speculation, perhaps there's a problem at a lower level than "Amazon the company". This sort of thing would certainly help explain why some people are extremely upset about spam from "Amazon" and other people are taking the position "you're crazy".

You signed up to be their customer, and you can turn these off. That they do this by default isn't ideal, but it's not spam - you have a business relationship with them.

it is spam.

just because i signed up for amazon.com, doesn't mean they get to spam me crap because they've buried a 2pt font unsubscribe feature that may or may not work over the course of a few weeks.

I call bullshit. I'm a very regular Amazon customer, and I never ever receive anything but order and shipping confirmations from them (and the occasional interview offer). Can't remember if I did anything special (like uncheck a few boxes), but I'm very sure it's possible to not be spammed by them as my inbox is proof.

This seems more like a bug than something intentional. What I find more interesting (and am somewhat saddened by) is that a bug such as this causes people to leap to the conclusion that it is part of a malicious, anti-competitive plot.

Sadly, it doesn't have to be malicious to be anti-competitive. Back in AT&T's monopoly days they were at their most destructive not when they were scheming, but when their size let them not give a fuck what they were doing to other people as long as it was good for them.

> This seems more like a bug than something intentional.

You can intentionally not fix a bug.

It sounds more like a side effect than a bug. Both domains have conflicting policies. He wants any Gmail user to be able to impersonate a sender from his domain, but not in a way Gmail supports.

Are you asserting that Google has not engaged in anti-competitive behavior or that they should be given the benefit of the doubt despite previously engaging in anti-competitive behavior?

Agree. It is time to start boycotting Google ecosystem until it is too late. It is definitely turning into a corporation of evil. I enjoy their search but definitely despise how they spread their proprietary tentacles everywhere. Sad.

I don't think it's malicious. Running mail servers and filtering spam is not easy.

Which ironically is the reason I most often hear from Gmail advocates/apologists for why they advocate Gmail over running your own e-mail server.

I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.

It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam.

Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.

it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people

There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

I haven't checked the new Outlook recently; maybe it's good. But all others that I know offer subpar service and honestly, look like crap. UX is important. For example, I cringe whenever someone makes me to use Roundcube-based webmail.

Yeah Roundcube's look definitely needs some help. Last year I did choose Roundcube for our webmail, but I spent several days altering its appearance so that it would look semi-professional.

I started with their new theme called "Larry" and then corrected the fonts, colors, graphics, and certain element sizing decisions.

Fastmail has a nice UI, is fast, contributes to the open source Cyrus IMAP service (among other projects) and has business accounts.

Google has attempted to kill open protocols like xmpp and RSS in order to lock people into their services. Why is it so crazy to think they could be trying with GMail?

Not crazy, just unlikely.

Most of the spam I get through to my Gmail inbox is from SEO spammers using Gmail. They keep sending the same material with the same username formats and same names, I mark hundreds of them as spam, and they still make it through.

Another large portion of my spam is from Chinese product spammers using Picasa albums and send to a friend feature. There are limited ways you can report this and despite marking almost every Picasa email I've received as spam, every single Picasa email still makes it through.

It looks like gmail is broken, and your employees should just switch service-providers.

Already downvoted below zero (about 2 seconds). I'll stand by what I said/implied: it is hard to co-exist with Google systems (and apparently also with pro-Google shills/apologists). I know this post violates HN standards, but I didn't think the parent did.

I think its just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit so finds it hard to believe that their precious email providers are being a pain in the butt.

That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.

It's easy to see how transactional email providers have made money these days. You pay them for 70% of the brain damage, then take on the other 30% for your own.

I think there needs to be a more substantial karma gate to downvoting (10 000+), I'd be fine with falling out of that category myself. I've only been interacting on HN for the past year or so, but lurked for several years prior: the community has been becoming a lot more "redditish."

I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level arguments (uneducated, immutable beliefs, hyperbole, taking things personally, no objectivity). I.e.

> just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit

"Everyone" in that sentence should not have the right to be downvoting in the first place.

For the record, I downvoted you for bringing up the "HN is becoming Reddit" meme, which is something I've seen popping up here all too often for the last 4.6 years I'm participating in HN community (and from what I heard, it happened long before then too) - and yet for all those years of "becoming Reddit" HN still did not become it.

Also, Reddit is cool, and there's ton of quality discussions - usually under particular subreddits. For example, I love /r/KerbalSpaceProgram for a perfect combination of being large, friendly, fun, and full of people willing to teach each other some more advanced science.

To address your point: I think current downvote gate is fine and adjusting it up won't really help much. What would help (though I don't know how to achieve that) is people realizing that when saying anything controversial, you might end up getting a bunch of downvotes immediately, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour or two. It takes time, but one just has to get used to it.

TL;DR: karma comes and goes; look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations.

> look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations

Huh. Maybe we should take that metaphor literally and implement it!

YES. This has been killing me for months- my clients keep crawling in my asshole and all of my efforts have changed exactly none of the problem.

Roughly related to their XMPP implementation too. Really broken, and hard to co-exist with. To make things worse, they have Hangouts too now.

I've found that this community is beyond unwelcoming, bordering on toxic. I no longer see the merit in contributing, and furthermore I find that reading these comment threads has become less and less valuable.

Then I suggest you take a break yes.

I find hn a really to be a really good combination of intelligent, grown up discussion with little name-calling etc.

That said, I think on hn one must be prepared to be corrected, -that's just part of being scientifically minded. As the old saying goes: "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another."

Yeah that's the consensus, and that's what it was meant to be, that's what it once was. However these days, especially in a community where only certain individuals can downvote, they become the only ones to control the discussion. What was supposed to encourage a higher level of discussion has instead created a community that is the exact opposite.

Who cares about my stupid comments, sure, I'm an idiot- I'll agree to that. Unfortunately, I see it happen all the time. The parent of this, for example, was downvoted immediately.

Everyone in this community is prepared to be corrected- the problem is when there's no correction offered. It's a community of suppression, and it's not hard to see.

I agree that there is too many incorrect downvotes given.

I don't think it is a big problem though only that it has been slightly increasing.

(one comment you'd see back in the days when comment scores where displayed was: "sorry for the downvote, -reading hn from a mobile device ". You don't see this comment anymore but I'm not sure if that is because it was easier to detect accidental downvotes back then or because people where more polite.)

There is plenty of disagreement among people who can downvote. And everyone can upvote so bad downvotes should be corrected rapidly by the rest of the community.

Perhaps HN users need to be reminded to upvote things that have been unfairly downvoted? (Although I've seen plenty of examples of corrective upvotes supplied pretty quickly).

Personally speaking I downvoted your comment because I often downvote things that smack of conspiracy thinking - never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

Another issue I have with your argument - I don't believe Gmail has the market share to make such a fiendish strategy viable.

I said it could be an accident in the original post.

And try doing business with small businesses and then tell me what market share you perceive GMail as having.

You did say that, but it felt like a disclaimer rather than something you genuinely considered to be a possibility.

I think, right or wrong, you'd probably get a better result if the rage in your text was clearly directed at the consequences rather than the motives - if nothing else because, as you say, the motives don't actually change the consequences and it's the consequences you, I, and everybody else who likes having their own email setup has to suffer.

(to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether or not you should have been downvoted, only on my best guess as to how to get across the same information without it happening)

So andybak, congratulations on clinging to a sweet sounding one-liner, but let's think a little more about it. So anytime something bad happens to a person (their wallet or phone is stolen, or their family dog is killed), and the victim believes the perpetrator acted maliciously, would you tell them that "smacks of conspiracy thinking" (whatever that means to you)?

Another educational moment for you would be to look up the word "conspiracy" to learn what it means. I understand that you were hoping to use it as a dismissive term, but you would have been better off using a universally dismissive term like "crazy", as there are a lot of rational people that understand the factual meaning of "conspiracy" and don't interpret it in the same way you do.

I actually used the term "conspiracy thinking" and I would regard this as a noun phrase with a meaning distinct from "conspiracy".

Weird. My comment must have been in close enough proximity to andybak's comment that "they" must have downvoted me when they meant to downvote him.

No, marco, you're just being "corrected." Iron sharpens iron, duh.

Although I'm not certain what you're implying by "corrected", I hadn't ever heard that phrase about iron before. Thanks, I like it.

You and I had similar difficulty yesterday vis-a-vis arbitrary downvoting. I was referring to a comment made at me regarding how HN comments are for correcting people who are wrong, and accompanying that is downvotes. Except for when "correction" has nothing to do with the downvote, or none is offered.

It doesn't matter. The conversation at HN is toxic. I've bitched enough. I was just reaching out for commiseration.

This is not a general issue with delivering mail to Gmail users. This is not even a mailing list. He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup.

His employees want to receive mail sent to @dnalounge.com in their Gmail inboxes. It's a non-standard configuration and brittle. You can't really expect them to support it for free.

Google offers a couple of supported ways to do it. Most prominently: pay for Google Apps. But you can also use Gmail like a regular mail client and retrieve mail using POP3.

"He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup"

No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.

I did read the article and that's exactly what he's doing. He forwards everything to Gmail, and then allows users to send from Gmail via his SMTP server (or maybe doing some spoofing but it wouldn't look so clean). Essentially outsourcing hosting of inboxes (but just inboxes) to Gmail.

I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail account, they set their From line to employee@dnalounge.com. (Google lets you do this if you jump through some hoops to verify that you can actually receive mail at that account.)

And that is the description for a fairly normal "forward all my mail to my personal inbox" scenario. Its not rocket science and it is not using gmail as his backend. We do it with part-time faculty.

You are misunderstanding what is happening. He is not using Gmail, his employees are.

Those are Gmail accounts belonging to his employees but he is using them in the back of his mail setup instead of hosting @dnalounge.com inboxes himself (or paying Google to).

He doesn't use them. His employees chose to forward their email because they want to use the same interface for both their work and personal email. He does host @dnalounge.com inboxes.