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 ...
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.
I think it’s more about making things easy for his employees. His comment is just recognising that they already have personal gmail accounts so he’d like to allow them to use the same client for work email. Data privacy doesn’t seem to be an issue for him.
I do the same thing for my mail - rather than juggle between accounts I can just select from a dropdown which account to send as, and I see all my mail in one inbox.
His setup is complicated because he’s doing additional processing on the incoming mail for his domain - he can’t just hand it over to gmail, he wants to relay it. And because SPF breaks mail relaying he’s been relying on a workaround - he’ll just move on to implement RFC8617 instead now (assuming that gmail supports it - it’s still listed as experimental).
Sure, as a good admin he should certainly implement all industry best practices.
Of course, once he did that he’d still have the same fucking problem as unless he convinced the rest of the world to drop SPF the relayed messages would still be rejected.
I have a personal domain I use for email, with an address set up as firstname@lastname.family
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: firstnameatlastname.family@gmail.com. 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.
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.
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.
I think it’s more about making things easy for his employees. His comment is just recognising that they already have personal gmail accounts so he’d like to allow them to use the same client for work email. Data privacy doesn’t seem to be an issue for him.
I do the same thing for my mail - rather than juggle between accounts I can just select from a dropdown which account to send as, and I see all my mail in one inbox.
His setup is complicated because he’s doing additional processing on the incoming mail for his domain - he can’t just hand it over to gmail, he wants to relay it. And because SPF breaks mail relaying he’s been relying on a workaround - he’ll just move on to implement RFC8617 instead now (assuming that gmail supports it - it’s still listed as experimental).
Honestly if anything he should focus on creating a solution where he can have DKIM active. He has dmarc and SPF, but not DKIM.
Sure, as a good admin he should certainly implement all industry best practices.
Of course, once he did that he’d still have the same fucking problem as unless he convinced the rest of the world to drop SPF the relayed messages would still be rejected.
I have a personal domain I use for email, with an address set up as firstname@lastname.family
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: firstnameatlastname.family@gmail.com. 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.
It’s a bar.
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.