lnr | So why the poll?

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So why the poll?

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>

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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.

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

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).

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?

Send it from one address to the other and then send it on to people who have crap email setups (my father can't *receive* mail from @chiark, who knows why... so I have to do this fairly often).

One from each address.

Both?

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.

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

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]

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.

*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.

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.

What if you don't know in advance which of the people on your recipient list are of type A and which are type B?

Ok, I'm picking holes now.

I *can* just live with having two separate mailboxes and handling some cases differently to others, it's just a bit of a nuisance.

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

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?

What if you don't know in advance which of the people on your recipient list are of type A and which are type B?

How could they be yr friend if you didn't know where they stood on The Great Gmail Debate? They might be teh evil in disguise!!

But yes, I totally agree that it's a nuisance. At the end of the day it's a question of what inconveniences you're prepared to accept in order to respect beliefs you don't share.

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.

TBH, my main problem with Gmail is the "no, we will NOT guarantee that anything flagged as 'deleted' is" policy. I also understand exactly WHY that is the case (the storage, as far as I understand it, is distributed and guaranteeing deletion in an extensively distributed environment is fraught with problems). That's also the main reason I haven't bothered chasing down a Gmail invite.

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.

Ditch email, and communicate only through written letters and Livejournal comments.

Ha!

I couldn't keep up with comments without the notification emails.

And snail mail has really let me down this week. My mum and both sisters sent me parcels for my birthday. Mum's at least went first class on Thursday. Guess how many parcels have arrived? None. Bollocks. If they don't turn up today I guess I have to go bully royal mail.

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.

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

(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.

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