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Really they closed a loophole that allowed them to have Enterprise level email features for free.
I sympathize that none of the paths forward are ideal, but when you use loopholes (especially ones that store your employees passwords in plain text???) expect things to eventually break.
You used a bodge to make your life easier, now the bodge is broken and you have to pick up the pieces.
He’s being a bit whiny here. He was having employees use Gmail as a client for his self-hosted POP mail, which is a niche use case that likely has a brittle implementation and doesn’t make any money for Google. Gmail offers a paid product for this kind of use case, but it won’t integrate with the rest of his (likely custom) automation. He wants to self-host parts of the system and have Google do the messy bits, but he’s not their customer and probably isn’t a very good product either.
He then complains that to self-host IMAP:
My server is now responsible for storing all of their messages, including all of their spam. It is a vast amount of data. I will have to implement quotas.
It’s 2025 and that’s a silly claim. A 12Tb HDD costs the same as a couple bottles of booze, and it’s not hard to write a script that clears out spam after 30 days. The other complaints are basically UX.
Normally saying a small business owner should self-host IMAP and write scripts would be a bit unreasonable, but this is JWZ.
Not to mention that he’s complaining about an SPF record for his own domain. Dude, change your SPF record.
I think this is a case of “knows enough to be dangerous”.
I think this is a case of “knows enough to be dangerous”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
At Netscape, he developed the Unix release of Netscape Navigator 1.0,[4][5] and later, Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or Usenet reader) to natively support HTML.[6]
I mean, you can draw the line wherever you want, but I expect that he probably knows more about mail than the average bear.
This guy should be smart enough to realize he’s complaining about not getting free storage from Google. You can’t just run a business off other people’s infrastructure and expect it to work out without any business agreement or contract. Google Workplace is a thing, and it sounds like this guy is just cheap if he won’t pay for either it or his own harddrives.
Also his claim that email chains end up creating an extra copy of an attachment every time? That’s not how most email clients handle attachments. They usually only carry forward in forwards.
And even if his idea is true for his setup somehow, data deduplication at the storage level isn’t particularly difficult to set up, and I would argue is table stakes for any business doing self hosting.
Similar when it comes to data retention policies, quotas, auto deletion of spam after a shorter time window. It’s not fun and for some setups may not be easy, but it’s part of the bare minimum for email. So yeah, you absolutely do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.
Edit: and if you pay someone to do it for you, you have to abide by whatever dumb hoops they make you jump through, or find someone else to pay.
This is awful, but while I see the huge impact for personal users, I’m not sure I see the business case for his current setup. I’m sure this will inpact business setups, but his specific use case just seems off.
He really buries the lede about why the weird setup of why address@businessdomain.com (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from businessname_address@gmail.com (to my mind a misused personal email) in the first place. It’s down in the comments:
You can’t be serious. Especially for a company he runs, this is silly. Just tell them they have to use the business domain for business email. The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.
With his current setup Google is already accessing all his company mail data. I don’t really get his objection to having the MX record directly route to them at this point.
I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.
Edit: Didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m not the only one with the takeaway that this seems to be jwz trying to use google/gmail for email storage without paying for google workspaces for his employees. Maybe that isn’t the case, but it sure looks like it.
The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.
It’s a bar.
I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.
The post makes it sound like he has a bunch of automation he likely wrote himself on incoming mail, but he wants Google to do some messy parts (spam filtering, archiving, providing a nice client). Google has no reason to want to continue doing that for him and the handful of other people doing something similar.
He needs to use a mta that supports arc sealing and setup his Google workspace to accept the arc from his server. Pretty sure Google also supports connectors for email so he could even just have Google accept all emails from his ip. I suspect he is cheaping out and doesn’t want to pay Google for a business grade service.
I don’t care what he did in the past, it is obvious he is not an up-to-date email admin. Using free consumer accounts as your primary email, is not a defendable position for anyone other than the self employed.
This guy reminds me of an asshole I used to work for. The company was called ABC, say, so he set everyone up with ABC-Alice@gmail.com, ABC-Bob@gmail.com, and so on. He got really, really pissed off when ABC-NewStarter wasn’t available to the extent that he wrote non-stop emails to the person who registered it, Google, his solicitor, even the police demanding it be relinquished and moaned non-stop that the world wasn’t bending to his whim.
I’m not supporting Google - it’s annoying that they’re revoking a feature - but this is a real XKCD 1150 situation.
Just going to start this off by saying I have little to no sympathy for this guy’s situation.
While the situation does suck (and this is how I found out I’m losing this feature too), we can’t really be surprised that Google is finally getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT. Eventually, security must move forward and ditch laughably insecure methodologies, and this does mean peoples’ workflows will get broken. But if we kept bad shit around because removing it negatively affects someone’s workflow, we’d never get anywhere.
And on topic of the article, this dude is sitting in a pool of shit of his own making. From the comments:
I’m not “sticking with them” in any way, it is that my staff are statistically average humans and therefore their preferred email addresses end in gmail dot com.
I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin. Being the company IT guy means making internal tools available, making them easy enough to use, and making people use it. He says that the staff is “statistically average”, which means they should be smart enough to use a company mail service and not facilitate his users to use a free 3rd party service to kludge shit together.
One of the gigs I was at used Kerio Connect as their self hosted email solution, and you know what? Even the below average users could figure it out without having to hook into a Gmail account.
This dude is trying to bubble gum and duct tape his orgs mail flow with below sub par methods and complains about it breaking, all because he couldn’t be bothered to push back and not hook their company email into Gmail. Don’t be surprised you’re in a circus when you’ve got clowns running your infrastructure.
