I ran into this problem as well. So, now, as standard practice, when I set up forwarding between GMail accounts, I add a single filter to the account being forwarded:
Matches: -96f0f0036730a7d970a678e8f933e8b7
Do this: Never send it to Spam
The string is just a random hex string, the minus (-) tells it to match all messages that do not contain this string. No message should ever contain it, so no message should ever be sent to spam in the original account. Once it gets to the end account, GMail will still filter it and put it in Spam if it is spam.
Unfortunately, you can't use "in:", "is:", "label:", or "has:star" in filters. Filters are applied before these things are determined. If you try to, you get the following message from GMail:
Filter searches containing "label:", "in:", "is:", or stars criteria (i.e. "has:yellow-star") are not recommended as they will never match incoming mail. Do you still wish to continue to the next step?
This works because this filter will match every mail, not just the mails that have the spam label. In the end it does what you wanted but the error is still right.
I specifically tested for this when consolidating various Gmail addresses behind an Apps account, and my fix was similar: a match on * seems to include spam.
It's slightly bizarre that the email forwarding you can configure in settings would not skip all spam checks, and not even indicate as much.
I did this as well, and it has been working great for me for a few years. A month ago I noticed by chance that it had stopped forwarding 12 hours earlier for no apparent reason. Deleting the rule and recreating it got it working, but it got me thinking of doing a more robust solution.
People who do this are really annoying and have no concepts of separating business and personal life. If you don't mix business with pleasure then why are you doing it with your e-mail? How hard is it to check two accounts or have two accounts setup on your phone? There are some lines where business and personal shouldn't cross and e-mail is one of them.
How does the appearance look? You send e-mail to foo@business.com and then funkyjizzbeats20@gmail.com replies to you! What could be more professional than that?
Also, what about security? How would people feel to know you've forwarded an e-mail they sent to a business account to your personal account? Is this just something no one thinks about?
> How does the appearance look? You send e-mail to foo@business.com and then funkyjizzbeats20@gmail.com replies to you! What could be more professional than that?
If you configure your GMail account correctly, it will reply via the other account's own SMTP servers. There will be no evidence of your private GMail account, even in the headers. (This is not the same thing as just configuring GMail to set a particular "From:" address.)
> Also, what about security?
If both accounts are hosted by Google, then unless you're doing something stupid with one of the passwords they're pretty much equally secure.
If your business account has privileges within the app domain, you might actually get a security benefit by not being logged into it all the time. Kinda like not being logged in as root all the time.
In the "Accounts and Import" settings, you add an account and instead of choosing "Send through GMail (easier to set up)", choose "Send through <example.com>'s SMTP servers".
And then you need to enter the username, server, password, etc for the other account, which can even be another GMail account.
Gmail allows you to send from your other email addresses through the web interface. It is nice having multiple accounts in the same mailbox so they can share labels.
I don't think it's a violation of trust to have mail forwarded from one account to another account on the same provider. Email does not have an implied amount of security or privacy. Sending email is like sending a postcard--Anyone involved in its transit has the opportunity to read it.
Ok, so I'm sure you won't mind then if you send an e-mail to csr@myhealthprovider.com with your latest lab results and someone replies from their personal Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo? More importantly, why would you have e-mails from multiple people in the different inbox's? If you're allowed to check your e-mail at work then keep your family/friends using your personal account and your business contacts using your work one.
Your comment about security is extremely disturbing. You're right people can intercept it, however, if I send an e-mail to someone at a company and they forward it to their personal account, that's the minute I stop doing business with that company.
I get the appeal of combining them, but it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
Read underwater's comment as well. He has some good points.
I would never send an e-mail about confidential medical information. Knowing how insecure e-mail is, that would be reckless. Read my other comment in this thread to learn about how insecure e-mail is. The fact that people think it's private or secure is a major problem. But your outrage is not misplaced -- knowingly mishandling mail is not simply excused because e-mail is already insecure.
> ... it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
My defense of the "many inboxes forwarding to one" scenario was not meant to cover every perceivable scenario. Obviously I would not advocate it in all situations and many situations would not be appropriate for that. If someone does not set it up right, I am not trying to defend that sloppiness.
An example of a good fit: someone who works part time at several companies, or the sole proprietor of a few businesses. If mail goes to CEO@ABC, replies are from CEO@ABC; mail to CEO@XYZ is returned by CEO@XYZ. If all of them are on Google Apps for Domains anyway, it is not a big deal, it's not less secure, and the owner of the e-mail address has less authentication and security overhead. Note that if you are mixing providers, like google apps and self-hosted mail, it gets much more complicated. In that case you are altering the physical security of that data.
Examples of bad fits: customer service, sales messages, bug tracking, official company broadcasts, and many others.
Regarding underwater's comment: obviously if the e-mail does not belong to you, you should not forward it somewhere other than the owner's server without the owner's permission.
Re-reading my comment, I should've mentioned that a shared mailbox is only appropriate in some cases.
Unless things have changed recently, sending as an address other than the Gmail account you're sending from results in a tacky "On Behalf Of" clause that displays both addresses to the recipient.
There is a simple fix for this. Gmail can be configured to send via any arbitrary mail server. So you can configure your person account to send via the SMTP settings of your business account.
This leaves no evidence of your personal account, even in the headers.
Not if you are sending as a @gmail account from a different @gmail account. No way to remove your `Sender:` header in that case. Ridiculous, as you can easily fix it for any other @domain.
I would agree with the envelope analogy if the message was not encoded in plain text. Say base64--an intermediate has to go through a slight process to read it, like opening an envelope.
Mostly, it's worse than a postcard. It'd be like if every letter carrier makes a copy of the postcard, then is supposed to discard theirs once the next person has their copy. There is zero guarantee that any of the several copies were actually discarded, and it's highly improbable that they were erased securely by any of the intermediates.
Knowing that the messages are transmitted in plain text across at least two mail servers (often more), and across several intermediate ISPs, it is ... unlikely... for an informed person to have an expectation of privacy in email.
Encryption solves all these problems, but we all know that's not in mainstream use. Not even signing!
Plus, Gmail lets you be logged in to two accounts from two different tabs in the same browser. Though usually I actually set up two separate browser profiles entirely, it's really not that hard to keep business and personal separate.
There may also be liability when you leave the job as you're retaining copies of data that doesn't belong to you.
Not to mention that in the case of a lawsuit you might be required to give access to relevant emails. Mixing personal and professional accounts could quickly get messy.
^^^ This x1000, all of the kids starting businesses and using the cool new thing Google Apps and forwarding it to their personal Gmail account have no concept of this.
Most startup founders do not have a separation of business and personal life or have very little separation. When setup properly outgoing emails will be sent from the correct address. There are no security concerns, someone can easily download all their mail if they're trying to get a copy.
It depends, if they're starting a company then they should be setup separately from the start. You can't honestly tell me that you want Frank from the call center at your health provider getting a copy of your health records that you just sent in to his personal Gmail account?
If they're simply creating something to make some extra money then sure you could use the same account, but to be taken professionally you should keep them separate.
If you never interact with a gmail account, the spam filtering isn't going to work very well. It can't tell what you've read or skipped, and you never compose anything, so it doesn't know who are your real correspondents. That's why forwarding in this way is a bad idea.
> To be more efficient, I started forwarding my work email running on Google Apps to my personal email at Gmail. This is pretty common. All of the devs at my previous company handled their email this way. Why log in to two places, right?
This is a terrible practice. Work mail will be full of confidential information which shouldn't be mixed with your personal files, especially after your employment ends.
That's not good enough in this case. The problem here, as I understood it, was that spam in the work email wasn't coming into the personal email in the first place, rendering the personal email incomplete. You would have to check all of the spam boxes.
Fair enough. The article is just titled to obnoxiously grab attention "Gmail is ruining your company!" instead of "Gmail forwarding doesn't always work" or something similar.
But hey, it's at the top of HN, so it must have worked.
Gmail's handling of multiple accounts is just about the poorest I've seen in any email client. Even Microsoft Outlook handles multiple accounts better!
The worst is their abysmal "On Behalf of:" handling when sending as an @gmail.com address from another @gmail.com address. There is no way around having your "main" email end up in plaintext in the header of every email you send as the "anonymous" email. And anyone replying to you via Outlook replies to the main address. You can send as @yahoo or @hotmail addresses with no evidence of your main gmail account, but for some reason they don't let you with a second gmail address.
Where does this "On Behalf of:" text appear? I just tested this, and sending an "on behalf of" email to another gmail account doesn't result in this text appearing anywhere in the gmail client. The original mail address appears in the headers under "Sender:" with the alias mail address appearing under "From:". However, if you open the email in gmail and don't check the headers manually, there's no indication it's not from the alias address. Replying to such an email, the "To:" field populates properly with the alias address.
In gmail, you'll be able to see the person's "secret" main email address in the `Sender:` field after clicking `Show Original`.
The real annoyance is Outlook. If someone responds to that email via Outlook/Exchange, the reply will be sent `To:` your main email address rather than to the address you sent with.
Would probably be a good idea for Google to add an "Include spam?" checkbox in the forwarding settings. Checked by default if the destination address is within gmail, otherwise unchecked by default.
Personally I think if you turn on forwarding at the account level, everything should be forwarded straight away and no filters or spam processing should be done.
If you forward a filtered set of emails (if that's even possible in gmail) then you presumably know what you're asking for.
The joke is that filtering seems to happen prior to spam classification, so you can use filtering to get around this oversight (there are example cited above).
Why would anyone want to forward work e-mail to a personal account when both are on Gmail? I would understand if the work e-mail messages were on a server that cannot be accessed from outside the office (although, if such a policy exists, you should ask yourself why and, probably, not auto-forward it) or something with a horrible and confusing interface or very limited space, but not here.
I suffered from this and now have set up a filter on the forwarding account that goes something like: 'Matches: from:(*) Do this: Never send it to Spam' so it forwards absolutely all email. My personal account then dumps then filters stuff in to spam folder that I do check.
Did you know Chrome has multiple profile support? It's under Settings -> Users. After you've got more than one user, there's a quick-user-switch icon in Chrome's title bar.
You can actually sign in to multiple google accounts and switch between them (at least for email / docs - not analytics / other services). I can't remember exactly how to do it, I think you need to enable multiple sign in on the account first.
They certainly do. I've found that feature to be pretty buggy, personally. Command + tilde is faster than clicking a drop down and waiting for the switch.
When I was using it, not all of their services were supported, and to get into the right account I'd frequently have to log out (which logged me out of every account).
Another fun one was clicking on Google Docs links. It rarely was using the right account and allowed me to go forward. Usually got the "Please request access to this document" message.
You're talking about Google's multi-login, which allows you to log into Google with multiple accounts. This thread, however, is about Chrome's profiles, which lets you open multiple browser windows each with a different profile (i.e. cookies, Google account, extensions, etc.).
Pretty sure you can use two regular windows to run separate accounts (although the colour coding would be useful). Another option is running multiple user profiles in Chrome.
I use Fluid (http://www.fluidapp.com/) with Separate Cookie Storage for my gmail accunts. (And also for separate facebook, xing, linkedin etc. accounts)
I usually set the new Gmail to retrieve email by POP/IMAP from old one, and have a filter defined in the old one:
Matches: from:(*)
Do this: Never send it to Spam, Exclude from SmartLabel categorization
In this way, every single email is forwarded to the new account and filters in the new one deals with spams or whatever. But you can always conveniently check mistakenly spammed emails in your new account.
Sorry about the Linkedin one (it was partially mine, and other like me's, fault).
You see, I signed up for many Linkedin groups and then realised that they were sending me too many emails. I removed all of the emails in Linkedin and then found that this would take at least a week before I stopped getting the emails. I waited two weeks, the emails had not stopped and so I classified them as spam.
The issue is that Google is using collaborative filtering, which will tend to weight such emails more highly as spam given that I and others have noted them as spam. Its normally quite effective, but you do need to check your spam box quite often. This isn't because the algorithm doesnt work, its just because of noise created by people using the spam button inappropriately for your use cases.
The root cause of the problem is the hassle in dealing with multiple email accounts. OP decided to consolidate by forwarding emails from multiple accounts int one. I found the WebMail Notifier add-on for Firefox invaluable when dealing with multiple email accounts. It let me keep the accounts separate yet able to see new emails in them and login to multiple accounts with ease. There's no need to consolidate, just managing them better.
If you fetch/read mail locally, you can get around this by pulling down emails from the spam folder directly via IMAP.
Hotmail email forwarding has this same issue, but only has POP access, so you can only access the inbox without the web interface. You can tune down the aggressiveness of the spam filter to a minimum (but not turn it completely off).
After reading this thread I went over to my gmail spam filter. Five business opportunities right there waiting in the spam folder for a reply.Gmail was the last Google service I was using, but I must now depart for better pastures. Hello nuuton email. You have just been borned.
For very important email, consider using an email address that is not published on the web and that is difficult to guess. Search on the user name of your address to make sure there are no results.
Only when you decide that someone is both important and trusted, have them use that email address.
Does anybody have a suggestion for a simple email forwarding service for random domains? e.g., if I own example.com, is there a simple way with high uptime to forward all incoming email to all addresses to an email account at a separate domain?
Yes, and this is why I don't really advertise any other e-mail than my personal e-mail, though I reserved a couple real-name addresses for when there is a real need. Good thing I don't really need a work email as a student yet...
A better way of doing this is to create a filter that forwards everything to your personal Gmail, then create another filter in your personal Gmail account to label it.
HN has an international audience. While the word retarded appears to be common in the US it's an offensive slur in other parts of the world; especially the UK.
Please, I'm not telling you not to use it, but I am gently asking you to consider using some other word instead.
Come on, it's absolutely mundane and non offensive to call a thing or a behaviour retarded, it's really only offensive when talking about disabled or unintelligent people. For example:
"Steven Hawking is retarded" == offensive
"The design of this chair is retarded" == inoffensive
I'm not going to try to persuade you that a hateful slur is offensive, even when it's not being used about people.
"Bob is so gay" == offensive
"That chair is so gay" == probably still offensive
I'm happy to agree to disagree. You don't think your use of the word is offensive - that's fine. But you don't get to tell me what I (or others) find offensive, and many people find any use of the word retarded offensive.
Perhaps it's a generational thing. Are you young? (Less than 35?)
Sexual orientation (and race, because someone's sure to make the analogy) has little effect on one's public life, it's just taking society a long time to realize that it's not relevant enough to make any sense as a pejorative. I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way, whichever words the euphemism treadmill brings.
Sexual orientation and skin colour are still used as insults even though sensible people agree that it's stupid to do so.
> I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way
I have no problem with people saying "This decision is dumb" or "This decision is stupid" or "This decision is idiotic". I do have a problem when people say "This decision is retarded" because that's not general stupidity, it is linked specifically to people with learning disabilities.
Google's spam filter seems to be having more issues these days. I used to ignore the spam filter, but got a reminder email which forced me to check the spam folder, and lo behold there was the email. I always open emails from that person and Gmail marks it as important, I wonder how it could possibly classify it as spam(assuming the email servers remained the same). The funny part was that just a few days prior I read a comment on HN warning about the spam filter and I had been meaning to check the spam folder but didn't.
I've been getting increasingly fed up with gmail, but not quite to the point of making me set up exim. Does anybody know of a mail server I can throw on ec2 and forget about?
As we converge on a handful of major email providers, are we really much better off? Would you be singing the same song of Hotmail a decade ago, or is it just because Google seems to be the Monopoly with a Heart of Gold?
It doesn't really matter if it's "a smart idea", it already happens and you have no control over it. A simple search for setting up your own mail-server is just a search for people who have done that saying "don't ever setup a personal mail server because it's guaranteed to be blacklisted".
Spam has lead email to basically become this closed ecosystem. If you don't use one of the already established major email providers, ISP's or domain name registrars the reliability of email hits the floor.
While I understand your sentiment, I respectfully disagree that it does not matter if it's a smart idea. Because if it is not a smart idea then that means we can do better. One of the projects I'm working on solves the "closed ecosystem" problem. The use of the term "closed ecosystem" is ironic because it seems to me that the "open" nature of email receiving (not sending) is what leads to the spam problem. In other words, I do not see the problem as the fact that people can send mass quantities of junk email. I see the problem as the fact that daemons accept and deliver mail from anyone. (And then resort to blacklisting.) What if the system was "closed" by default and instead a sender would contact the receiving SMTP daemon directly (no internediary) and would first need either a means of authentication (i.e. he has been pre-approved) or a way to have his sending address revieved and then receive permission to send. Right now you can see someting like this within a domain. For example, one gmail user might be able to send to another gmail user, directly, as they are both able to authenticate. They both have accounts (private accounts, not some RBL, DKIM or other scheme managed by an interloper) and these accounts can be checked. But if one gmail user wants to send to some non-gmail address, the non-gmail recipient has no knowledge of the sender in the form of an account against which he can authenticate. There's no privity between sender and receiver. Instead third party schemes are used. Such as blocklists for sending.
Consider the idea of running a mailserver than only accepts mail from a predetermined set of sending addresses. What would be the chances of receiving junk mail?
Blacklists are run by anti-spam zealots who really don't care about what is fair or a smart idea.
For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP.
From the blacklist operator's perspective, the broad effect of the block is intended to cause headaches for a ISP as a form of punishment for allowing outbound spam. Our deliverability (and many others) was just cannon fodder for that fight.
I wish we could get these anti-spam zealots to apply the same effort to stopping junk postal mail. The history of direct mail is interesting and perhaps instructive. It has been kept alive by those who do the delivery (cf. those who do the sending). I have sometimes wondered if the same might be true for email.
If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?
> It would seem to degrade the usefulness of EC2 for anyone wanting to run their own mailserver.
People chose whether or not to use a block list. Thus your problem isn't really with the person creating the list, but with the mail admin choosing to use that list to filter email. That person feels it works for them.
Very few people should run their own mail server. Email is, now, toxic. Spammers pretty much destroyed email; especially the ability for people to run their own servers for sending.
For a history of a (perhaps overly vigorous block list) look at SPEWS - spam prevention early warning system - which had a few honeypots and which happily blocked large ranges. The Usegroup news.admin.net-abuse.email has very many threads from innocent blocked users and wingnuts screaming "change your ISP!!"
Spammers destroyed an open email system that relies on a centrally controlled DNS. Probably because they were among the only ones who learned how email works. We never made the effort to teach the population at large, preferring instead to let email be centralized via "email providers". And now, after decades of spam, we still have people who argue it is the best, or even the only, way to do things.
Spammers did not destroy the protocol or well-designed email servers and clients.
"Very few people should run their own email server"
That mindset is why we have a problem, in my opinion. We have actively tried to prevent people from learning.
The history of block lists is a history of the failure of the "email provider" (i.e. "very few people should run email servers") idea. Of course, anti-spam is a career for some people, so "failure" is relative. They've succeeded in trying to exert control over a common internet capability, for profit.
The internet began as peer-to-peer. There was no "DNS". And there were no "email providers". Everyone had a responsibility to learn how to use the network and the basic services it could provide e.g. messaging. Then some people got some bright ideas about how to make money. "Spammers" were not the first ones.
Enjoy that spam in you inbox. It is the product of ignorance.
But if you're doing it legitimately, and not bulk emailing, EC2 has proper SMTP forwarders you can use. And if you ARE bulk emailing, they have a service (plus you're not using Gmail for that anyway).
SMTP doesn't just drop messages if the destination server is unavailable. It'll either get held back at an intermediary server until your server comes up again, or else it will be bounced back to the sender.
That's not true. It should either send the email to the recipient or return it to sender. But it should never just drop the message (except for bounces which can be dropped since there is nowhere to send them if delivery fails).
An SMTP daemon will try to send the message a certain number of times, at a certain interval, then, eventually, it will stop ("bounce"). You can configure these settings if you run your own SMTP service.
I risk new messages getting bounced, but all of my email is backed up on my computer. And I'd archive everything to s3 (which has never lost data to my knowledge) in case both my ec2 instance and my laptop disappeared.
You can set up a different mail server with a lower priority. I run my own server on a VPS, but have Google Apps' SMTP server as backup for those cases, and it's been working fine for months.
Assuming your ISP is not blocking port 25 and your internet address is not on some blacklist you can send mail directly from your machine. No need to use intermediary SMTP servers.
Is it possible that someone people might like to use their native SMTP capability for low volume noncommercial email? Does every person who sends email have some overwhelming urge to send spam? Such that we must place pseudo control over sending email, any email whether commercial or noncommercial, in the hands of "email providers"?
My ISP doesn't block port 25, but since my IP address is technically dynamic, it's on Spamhaus' Policy Black List. That said, my ISP offers SMTP servers for proxying outgoing messages, so I used that for a while. I switched to a VPS because my home server died.
