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This guy reminds me of an asshole I used to work for. The company was called ABC, say, so he set everyone up with [email protected], [email protected], 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.
What a damn moron to both have this setup and the audacity to complain that it will stop ‘working’.
Who in their right mind would channel all his employee email through Google? That shit gets scraped the hell out off.
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”.
Agreed. I said it elsewhere, but despite his technical knowledge, he appears to be a terrible admin, one that I would only being on as a junior if I was hiring.
I’ve met (and been) this admin before, and a lot of the time it’s because they stepped up, are learning on the job, and don’t know what standard build/tool chains are. But when stuff breaks, it always ends up sounding like this blog post
I have definitely been this admin before, but when shit doesn’t go right, I always first went to “Okay, what did I fuck up?”
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 [email protected] (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from [email protected] (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.
I have a personal domain I use for email, with an address set up as [email protected]
Most people understand this just fine, but sometimes forms don’t work with .family as a TLD. EVERY NOW AND THEN, though, someone cannot comprehend an email address that doesn’t end in Gmail.com.
When I arrived to have some work done on my car recently the person on the phone had recorded my email as: [email protected]. Like, the actual word “at” was in there. I had never said anything about Gmail. And when I corrected it after arriving at the shop, their form had no issue with the .family TLD.
I think some people genuinely don’t understand that Gmail and email aren’t synonymous.
First Na Meat eh? 🍖
Honestly I don’t think I’ve even heard of the .family TLD and im a tech worker.
I’m not surprised that a gear head autocompleted it in his mechanical brain to something completely else. Maybe he’s been replaced by AI.
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.
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.
getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT.
GMail has supported POP3 over SSL for a while now.
That’s moderately better, but that’s just slapping a bandaid on an open wound. POP is still a garbage protocol that should be depreciated, even when you wrap it in SSL.
I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin.
FWIW, just to avoid Dunning-Kruger and because I think you are mistaken here: jwz
I can only assume that he has rather hand-crafted scripted workflows though.
Being good in one thing doesn’t make you good in something else. He is an inexcusably bad IT admin. The devs I work with don’t ask for my opinion on code and if they would, it would probably sound nice to someone who doesn’t know shit, but it’d still be a dumb opinion. Likewise I don’t ask for their opinion on how to create our IT infrastructure (beyond of course asking their requirements for testing servers and such). If they have an opinion on it, it’s generally not very coherent or founded in reality. Like the complaints of this guy. Though they’re generally not this dumb.
Like I said, dude knows his stuff. But I admin for a living, and if I worked with him, I’d be giving him 7 flavors of shit daily for these kinds of decisions.
These things work for small shops and small teams, but they don’t scale well and just lead to this kind of headache. And it’s awful for everyone who needs to help support it. And I know that, because I’ve been in those shoes more than once (and on both sides of it).
Programmers often make the worst admins.
Also true. Source: I am a programmer too.
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.
Thank you, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his setup seemed like a convoluted way to have Google handle the storage at no cost to himself. Glad I’m not the only one with that takeaway.
Yeah, they wanted storage and enterprise level spam filters for free and used a bodge to get it. Google probably stopped that feature because they weren’t the only company doing that. I doubt the average consumer account was costing them much in that department.
Dude needs to pay for google workspace instead of using Gmail.com for his employees.
Yeah, didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that detail was quite absent from the blog post.
I don’t even use gmail professionally and I was still using that.
Some (terribly implemented) services don’t allow changing e-mail on their accounts, and I have stuff I subscribed to aeons ago with a mail I am not using anymore.
Not that I can’t connect directly to that old crappy mail provider, but it’s very inconvenient.
But is that problem caused by Google or by the objectively worse service that won’t allow you to change your address?
People using gmail in 2025 have no one to blame but themselves. Google backs a fascist and pedo-criminal administration.
Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine
Which means they’re actively backing fascists and pedos.
Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.
He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.
You forgot to add that he obviously refuses to hire an actual IT admin to do IT admin stuff.
I think his reasoning about why not is rather understandable.
Wack
