[MiguelHudnandez]

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.

[bosch]

Ok, so I'm sure you won't mind then if you send an e-mail to [e-mail] 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.

[MiguelHudnandez]

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.

[Encosia]

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.

[ef4]

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.

[pkamb]

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.

[ef4]

Ah, I see. I hadn't thought about that case.

I have a lot gmail account, but only one of them is on the gmail domain name, so that hadn't come up for me.

[gabemart]

Currently, there's no such message with gmail. However, the "real" email address of the sender does appear in the headers.

[ef4]

There is for recipients using certain versions of outlook.

But there's a workaround for that, see my other comments on this thread.

[sliverstorm]

I'd say it is more analogous to regular first-class mail in an envelope. There is some expectation of privacy, but no guarantee.

[MiguelHudnandez]

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!