So why the poll?

[lnr]

Lets first make it clear that I'm not a gmail-is-evil person. It seemed quite a few people commenting weren't sure which side of the fence I was on. And it was interesting watching people trying to convince either me or each other of each side of the argument. I'm partly sorry I asked, because it has led to people getting worked up about it again which isn't what I was after.

Basically I'm aware that some of my friends are really genuinely unhappy about communicating by email when that email is going to end up in Google's database. Especially so when it's not obvious: like mailing lists or people who forward their email from another address. I was curious just how far this strong feeling goes because to be honest it's a complete bloody nuisance, and I'm sorry if it makes me selfish to feel that way.

At the moment I basically have three mailboxes, and none of them is good enough.

My work mailbox is reliable and has fairly good anti-spam measures too. It's a stable reliable mail system under the watchful eye of admins I know and trust who are paid to keep it that way, and no-one dislikes it. It's rare to unheard of for mail not to get through, and it's always been possible to fix any such problems. But it's for work, I'd never find personal stuff in amongst it, and it's not supposed to be for more than minor personal use anyway.

My main personal mailbox has an admin I know and trust, and does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. I read mail on it locally with a unix mail client I'm happy with, I can look at the logs and see what has actually happened to mail, and it has an email address which I've been using for some time and which is in everyone's addressbook. The problem is it's very strict about what mail it accepts. To a certain extent you can turn off the most aggressive bits and work around it, but basically now and then something happens and some people just can't mail me. At the moment no mail from hotmail can get through. My boyfriend and my sister can no longer send me mail. And the admin just doesn't have the time or effort to work out how to work around it, and has admitted he doesn't have the inclination either. It's just not good enough any more, which is a real shame.

And my third mailbox is on gmail. I'd rather I could access it by IMAP instead of only webmail, POP or by forwarding mail to another address, but the webmail is actually pretty good. The anti-spam is really good, considering the deprecated lnr@lspace.org address now goes there, and has been on the web and usenet for years and gets lots of junk as a result. I've not yet found anyone who can't mail me there. But some of my friends just don't want to communicate with me there. And specifically the admin of my main mailbox is one of them, and would be extremely unhappy with me forwarding that mail there.

So that's why I want to know just how many people feel strongly about gmail.

I'd really love any suggestions about what the hell I do now too. I don't want to keep changing email addresses. I don't really want to use a forwarding address that I can move around between suppliers either because that adds one extra layer where mails can get stuck and it's one where you have much less chance of being able to get at the logs and work out what's going on - especially as informal forwarding services tend to be run by friends who don't have the time to chase things down for one awkward user. And I don't know how the hell to *find* a mail provider who is not going to turn out to have one of these problems or another one altogether. I'm completely frustrated by the whole thing.

</rant>

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I just read my email in multiple places (the same as you I think), ever since I've had email I've had multiple email addresses and have never forwarded them arround; I've never had a problem with it.

[lnr]

What if you want to email several people. Person A doesn't like gmail, person B can't mail your other address. Which address do you send it out from?

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

You've got an account on kororaa.com.
If you want to revive it, email me.
I think it accepts hotmail.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Get a virtual server (eg linode or panix v-colo) for $20/month and run your own mail server, web server, DNS etc etc. Then you can be as tough or as lax as you like with anti-spam.

(To be honest, as an outsider, I don't like chiark's mail server; it's too "fuck you!" when it shouldn't be; I've seen it cause problems for legitimate senders).

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Seconded, but this isn't ideal for "normal people" (with no implication intended as to whether lnr is normal or not :-)) who don't want to run their own mail servers etc.

[emperor]

The flip-side, however, is that I get almost no spam there.

[lets not argue about SAUCE here; I just wanted to offer a reason why some people might like to have their email go through SAUCE]

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

As someone who does run his own mail server, I'd really prefer not to. Whenever I upgrade anything, I have to briefly panic about whether it's broken my mail setup. There's always the vague fear that the reason I haven't got an email yet is because I've accidently rejected it or dropped it in some black hole or another. And, perhaps most importantly, when it does go wrong, there's nobody for me to theraputically scream at.

I don't use gmail for the same reasons that I don't use hotmail or any other large provider. I like having my mail somewhere where I can always get at it, and don't have to worry about them suddenly altering usage policies in a way that would make it difficult to get at my data again. I like having the associated metadata that my mail logs give me. I like the fact that there's only one machine I have to destroy in order to get rid of all the evidence. If I could get all that without the misery of actually having to run the damn thing myself, I'd probably do so.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Worky, but only for the terminally enthusiastic.

[emperor]

I thought hotmail could email coriolis addresses? That would seem to solve the boyfriend+sister issue?

[lnr]

I got my coriolis address on lots of spam lists ages ago, so it's almost unusable now. I *could* switch to using slimy all the time instead I guess.

The eleanorb+thing addresses only work with chiark as domain, not coriolis or slimy. Or at least I can't get it to do anything with them.

[simont]

*hugs*

Yes, it's a pain finding a good mail provider. I occasionally think the only way I'll ever find one I'm completely happy with is to be my own mail provider – buy a domain, get a colo machine (or, I suppose, a Xen slice of someone else's), and point the former's MX record at the latter.

I come close to this in my main personal mailbox (which isn't on the same machine as yours, because my account on that one is not practically usable as my main mailbox for similar reasons to you), because the sysadmin has let me take an active role in maintaining the system's anti-spam setup, and in particular we recently set up a mechanism of per-user SMTP-time filters, so I can reject whole classes of email in a quite draconian fashion without having to worry about the effect on anyone else. (Such as email written in foreign alphabets, which when sent to me is 99.9% spam and even if one or two were legitimate I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway; so rejecting the whole lot with "554 Regrettably I only speak English" deals handily with a lot of my spam and actually improves the experience of anyone who genuinely thought it would be a good idea to send me real mail in Chinese.)

However, that setup is non-optimal in one or two ways, notably that it doesn't permit me to do anything about bounces. I'm currently funnelling all incoming bounces into a folder I never read, because otherwise they'd swamp me. This means I won't see real bounces, and I hate that, but there's honestly no way I'd find them in among all the crap even if I tried. So I'd quite like to experiment with things like signed return paths so that I can reject the enormous number of phony bounces and bounces of forged mail and only let through bounces of things I really sent (with the added benefit, of course, of allowing other systems to detect forged me-mail if they do SMTP callouts); but the sysadmin doesn't like those systems so I probably won't get to use them unless I migrate elsewhere.

Then there's the question of my primary email address, which isn't the same thing as my mailbox: around 1998 I paid actual money for a long-term account with a commercial mail forwarder, on the basis that my physical mailbox seemed (and indeed was) liable to move repeatedly and I wanted to have a long-term address so my correspondents didn't have to keep track of what it was this week. I'm rather regretting that decision too; if I had it to do all over again I'd have registered a domain rather than getting a forwarder address in somebody else's, because then there isn't another MX between me and my correspondents.

[fanf]

At the moment I filter bounces by checking that the bounce's To: matches the return paths that I use (which fortunately are not well-known). This is reliable and effective for me.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I love gmail with a passion. People who won't have any dealings with it are just poseurs :P

[artela.livejournal.com]

specifically the admin of my main mailbox is one of them, and would be extremely unhappy with me forwarding that mail there

I'm tempted to say that what you do with email once it has been sent to you so that you can access it is entirely up to you, and that includes forwarding it on to your own other email account. Anyone who is that paranoid about their email contents should also be aware that any of the umpteen servers that their mail passes through can also cause "holes" through which mail contents can be intercepted and read should anyone be so inclined - personally I get the feeling that anyone who thinks that the "powers that be" are that interested in their mailboxes whould get a life *lol*. Anyone that paranoid about their email contents should, in short, not use email but consider a secure method of sending info about the place... I wonder if they're as paranoid about their mobile phone texting?

[lnr]

Um, at the very least I have to have an address at which I can be contacted on system related matters. And umpteen is zero in this case normally.

Hmm, I wonder if a .forward on chiark which did something like

if (dislikes gmail) deliver locally
else forward to gmail

Of course I'm not convinced gmail is perfect even if you rule out the ethical issues. It would be nice if it did IMAP as well as POP for instance.

[knell.livejournal.com]

I run mail servers for a living (among many other things, obviously) and the last thing I want to do, I decided a while back, is to spend my spare time running *more* mail servers. So I moved uffish.net to (what was then the beta of) Google Apps For Your Domain and haven't looked back. The only thing I miss is IMAP.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I run one in my spare time for personal amusement, but even then I spend about 50% of the time wondering whether I really care and should just ditch the whole thing.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You could send them letters in envelopes and email them to ask whether they got your letter. Then they could tell if somebody has read it or stolen it.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Or just send letters. I miss letters.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

You could also get an orange webmail account if you want. It's also got a stupid spam filter on it, but, yanno, it's an option.

http://www.orange.co.uk/

Top right hand side

[lnr]

Oh I technically have one of those, but wouldn't try use it for real mail. It's used for the "text me" link on my userinfo :-)

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

(Directed at the world in general, rather than at lnr)

I think gmail has simply made these issues explicit. How many of the people who won't send stuff to a gmail account will send things to another account without getting an explicit statement in writing about mail retension policies etc? And some details on the imap server/email client being used.

If you're privacy is that important then don't send any mail that isn't encrypted, reject any incoming mail that isn't encrypted, and either only ever decrypt to memory or use a filesystem that supports secure deletion. Oh, and watch out for that virtual mmemory file.

You can't trust things like livejournal comments, because they are probably stored in a database, and although the table entry may get deleted that doesn't guarantee the data will also go immediately.

Would a compromise of, "I will never deliberately BCC a gmail address, and you can bounce anything that is from or to a gmail address if you want?" It may be slightly inconvenient for both parties, but at least the send will then know to resend the mail excluding gmail recipients or from some other account.

[rmc28]

I would use Gmail if you like Gmail, and be clear to the sysadmin that this is what you are doing. Perhaps the two of you can come up with a solution for essential communications between the two of you, but I am not sure what the sysadmin thinks the alternative should be in your current situation.

I do think that if someone is concerned about the privacy of their communication, they should be not using email at all or encrypting it. If I don't want people to know something I don't write it down - I do assume that anything I write down and send by email or publish on LJ (even under "locked" posts) can and probably will leak someday.

Now, I use Gmail for LJ comment notifications, and for various mailing lists (freecycle, flylady, ukmidwifery), where the searching and filtering capacity is extremely useful. I also use it for a lot of the throwaway email addresses for which I use my chiark account, but most personal mail is to rach@gits or rachel@lspace and ends up on hermes (and is filtered away into a "personal mail" folder there so that my main inbox stays roughly work-related). I'm employed to retiring age by the university and I certainly don't envisage leaving any time soon, so this works for me.

There is no way I am going to run my own mail service, and I honestly don't see how the arguments against Gmail are not also arguments against *any* commercial email service. Gmail is more explicit about it, which I think counts in its favour.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

I do think that if someone is concerned about the privacy of their communication, they should be not using email at all or encrypting it.

Quite.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the answer is; despite running my own mailserver I'm still struggling with spam. The current problem is mail with the spam in an image and a large block of real English text below it, which is very hard to filter. It also has valid return addresses and correct HELO. I don't really want to start deploying IP blocklists, and razor isn't helping very much.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if greylisting will help, since it isn't dependent on the content of the message, but I haven't had time to set it up yet.

And it has been known to reject legit mail :(

[aldabra]

I forward from chiark to gmail. The sysadmin(*) isn't pleased, but if he's "extremely unhappy" I think he's being uncharacteristically restrained about saying so; I've got him down as "fairly unhappy". What I do do is *tell* people I'm forwarding, and always reply from gmail, so I can't be said to be trapping anyone into prolonged conversations who would rather not be.

People who want to talk to me but not at gmail are usually happy to send me a ping at gmail to alert me that there's an e-mail waiting for me at a different address which I don't usually check. I'm happy to check a different address as long as I'm either expecting something to go there or I've been pinged that there's something waiting. If I had procmail-headspace I'd set chiark up to forward to gmail or elsewhere according to sender, but to ping me at gmail if it sent anything elsewhere.

(*) LJ comment-notifications go to gmail too, so I'm slightly careful what I say here about people with gmail-phobia; maybe I ought to say so on my profile page, but I don't think LJ admin is intrinsically more trustworthy than google admin. Though the argument is that that's not my decision to make...

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

I use Gmail as my 'business' email address, Hotmail for mailing lists and LJ comments, and I have an academic address at Napier on Outlook, plus a random Yahoo account and a few addresses that came with webspace. Out of all of those I seem to be using Gmail the most, and I find it to be pretty good. I like the way I get loads of storage, grouping emails as 'conversations' and the like.

As for the 'omg stealing privacy' thing with the adverts, I have to agree with Rachel; if I was so worried about my personal details getting yoinked I'd not be emailing at all. As it is, the adverts are not intrusive and sometimes useful, and what they do with the message contents is up to them really. I'm not one to make a fuss about it unless I suddenly get lots of spam to my home address/phone/main email. (And yes, you can infer from this my indifference to the Database State hysteria. Go figure :P)

[fanf]

You might like to try getting an account with fastmail.fm. Their infrastructure uses Cyrus with our replication code.

[lnr]

Hmm, figure I may as well try them. Interestingly I can send email from my account there but don't seem to be receiving any yet. I'll see what's turned up of my test messages by tomorrow :-)

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Personally I've never understood why people fixate on gmail so much - pretty much all the worrying things about gmail seem to apply to basically any large mail provider.

You could go for mail hosted by a small and relatively trustworthy organisation (eg http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/). This has the downside of them wanting cash, but otherwise I think meets most criteria.

You could go for A N Other webmail - personally I think yahoo is alright, which for whatever reason people tend not to worry about them being evil as much as Google. This may not apply to your specific people, though. They may have problems like less spam filtering.

You can sulk and start texting people instead.

http://www.pobox.com/ is a fairly reputable forwarding provider, although they do have the downsides you mention.

[pm215]

I get gmail to forward copies of mail to my SAUCEd account, so at least I don't have to keep checking gmail for new mail all the time. I think it ought also to be possible to configure the MUA so that if I replied to mail that was a forward-from-gmail it put a From: me@gmail on the reply. But it would all be a bit of a nasty lashup and of course you couldn't actually advertise a single reliable email address.

It does occur to me that if people would prefer others not to use gmail then submitting patches to SAUCE so that it's possible to communicate with hotmail users might be a good pragmatic way of reducing the number of people locally who wind up using gmail... [I haven't got the tuits to look at SAUCE myself so I'm not throwing stones very vigorously here.]

[reddragdiva]

I just read Ian Jackson's rant about this in the other place and now have some idea what provoked this.

I wonder if he will ever return to answer all the people pointing out his arguments would not only not convince anyone who didn't already agree with him, but would probably unconvince many who did.

[(Anonymous)]

OOB information suggests that he does plan to reply.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Everyone is suggesting technical solutions.

ISTM you need to either get better friends or fire up the cluebat.