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 ...
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.
The forwarding he’s talking about isn’t the same as you hitting forward in your mail client.
SPF only authenticates the first hop from the origin MTA. If you put a relay server in then you either need to disable SPF checking on subsequent MTAs or implement RFC8617. If you don’t then when subsequent MTAs check the original sender’s SPF it will fail because the message came from your relay.
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.
I’ve read through the post and the comments again, and it’s also that he doesn’t seem to want to train his users. They’re familiar with Gmail so he wants them to be able to use it. His users probably use their mailbox as an archive, and he doesn’t want to train them into understanding this is a bad idea, and he doesn’t want the hassle of dealing with ever increasing mail storage.
At my previous job, we had Exchange Online, so 50 GB of storage. I was still explaining to my users, they should store their handled mails in archives if they wanted to be sure they would always have them. (Obviously stored on parts of their hard drives set up to synch to the fileserver which had daily backups)
All of these things are normal parts of an admin’s responsibilities. The only reason he’s getting away with his setup is because he owns the business and there’s been nobody there for the past 20 years to explain this would lead to problems down the line. (Or if there have been, he’s conveniently ignoring that)
Now they’re here, he’s blaming Google for what is probably the least evil thing they’ve done this year.
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
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.
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:
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”.
It’s not his SPF record.
The forwarding he’s talking about isn’t the same as you hitting forward in your mail client.
SPF only authenticates the first hop from the origin MTA. If you put a relay server in then you either need to disable SPF checking on subsequent MTAs or implement RFC8617. If you don’t then when subsequent MTAs check the original sender’s SPF it will fail because the message came from your relay.
Dude, it’s jwz. You can assume he forgot more than you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
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.
I’ve read through the post and the comments again, and it’s also that he doesn’t seem to want to train his users. They’re familiar with Gmail so he wants them to be able to use it. His users probably use their mailbox as an archive, and he doesn’t want to train them into understanding this is a bad idea, and he doesn’t want the hassle of dealing with ever increasing mail storage. At my previous job, we had Exchange Online, so 50 GB of storage. I was still explaining to my users, they should store their handled mails in archives if they wanted to be sure they would always have them. (Obviously stored on parts of their hard drives set up to synch to the fileserver which had daily backups)
All of these things are normal parts of an admin’s responsibilities. The only reason he’s getting away with his setup is because he owns the business and there’s been nobody there for the past 20 years to explain this would lead to problems down the line. (Or if there have been, he’s conveniently ignoring that)
Now they’re here, he’s blaming Google for what is probably the least evil thing they’ve done this year.
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.