I have just learned that, beginning in 3 days, my employees will no longer be able to receive their work email. Apparently Google is dropping support for Gmail accounts being able to fetch mail from outside accounts. At all. And they announced this change less than 60 days ago. (The announcement was in the basement, stairs, leopard, etc.) What I want to accomplish is simple: When email ...
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.
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.
Why is it a garbage protocol? POP3 performs perfectly well for its intended use-case: as a mail-spooling protocol. If you want a multi-client mailbox protocol then use IMAP instead.
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).
I wonder how many people have company email addresses there.
It’s a bar/nightclub. Most employees at bars don’t use email as part of their work. It would be unusual (though maybe on-brand for jwz) for bartenders to have company email addresses, for example.
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 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.
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.
Why is it a garbage protocol? POP3 performs perfectly well for its intended use-case: as a mail-spooling protocol. If you want a multi-client mailbox protocol then use IMAP instead.
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).
I wonder how many people have company email addresses there.
It’s a bar/nightclub. Most employees at bars don’t use email as part of their work. It would be unusual (though maybe on-brand for jwz) for bartenders to have company email addresses, for example.
Programmers often make the worst admins.
Also true. Source: I am a programmer too.