Comments on: stupid gmail

By: Kenneth S.

Kenneth S. — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:30:23 +0000

Compared with Yahoo’s new email interface, gmail is about a few miles behind. At the end of the day, an email system providing highest overall productivity and stability usually prevails. Today how many email systems most of us has to interface with? Probably more than one or two. An email user-interface behaves totally differently can be “unique”, it also causes confusions to users who use other normal email systems on daily basis. Gmail drains more brain power from email users, hurts overall productivity. Using gmail makes me feel like in Hongkong – you drive on the left of the road.

Stupid gmail? Can’t agree more!

By: Ahmed Sabbour

Ahmed Sabbour — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:16:17 +0000

Well regarding Issue #1, Windows Live Mail seems to be doing it, you can unify two accounts and you can seamlessly switch between them..

By: david carlton

david carlton — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:54:24 +0000

Huh, interesting.

Right now, I’m routing e-mail through gmail, but having it sent both to and from my private e-mail. I’ve been doing it for all of two days now, but I really like the results, in terms of spam filtering: I didn’t like the hour and a half of figuring out why various configurations failed mysteriously, but now that it’s working, it works great. And I send e-mail through the private server.

Having said that, I don’t really know why I’m sending the e-mail back to my private server, instead of fetching it (via either IMAP or POP, I’m currently using a workflow where it doesn’t matter) from gmail directly. So I may switch to something closer to what you’re doing.

By: David Mackintosh

David Mackintosh — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:28:15 +0000

What I did is to set my gmail account to POP off mail from my private account. Then I enable IMAP on my gmail account, but told my IMAP client that my email address was my private email address, not my gmail address. This is re-enforced by emailing out through a private SMTP server, not a gmail server.

This gives me what I want: an out-sourced, anti-spam-managed inbox, on my private domain, with the benefits of gmail’s huge storage.

I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, but it’s working well enough that I feel brave enough to convert the wife’s email to the same setup.

By: david carlton

david carlton — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:32:37 +0000

Thanks for the information!

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:22:27 +0000

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on GMail or Google accounts. If I knew anything non-public about them, I couldn’t tell you.

Issue #1 arises because an email address is an identity for lots of purposes, not just GMail. If there were an interface for proving that two email addresses represented the same person, there would then be a difficult problem of how to merge the accounts: the mailboxes, the GMail settings, the calendars and their settings (if any), Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and gobs of other Google applications. That would be a very hard problem.

Issue #2 is evidently an anti-spoofing defense. If I could hijack your system long enough to delete your account (the simplest way is to be a friend of yours and do it from your computer) and then recreate it, I could grab incoming mail and generate fake outgoing mail, although presumably that wouldn’t give me access to your stored mail, calendars, etc. Even a limited spoofing scenario is bad enough that it’s worthwhile to make sure that Google accounts are never re-created.

Issue #3 I don’t understand very well, but I’d guess it has something to do with preventing email loops due to bad configuration somewhere, whereby Google forwards mail to the linked account which forwards it back to Google.

Documentation about all this could doubtless be improved a whole lot.