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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.
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.
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 [email protected] (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from [email protected] (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 have a personal domain I use for email, with an address set up as [email protected]
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: [email protected]. 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.
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.
I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin.
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.
Programmers often make the worst admins.
Also true. Source: I am a programmer too.
Really they closed a loophole that allowed them to have Enterprise level email features for free.
I sympathize that none of the paths forward are ideal, but when you use loopholes (especially ones that store your employees passwords in plain text???) expect things to eventually break.
You used a bodge to make your life easier, now the bodge is broken and you have to pick up the pieces.
Thank you, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his setup seemed like a convoluted way to have Google handle the storage at no cost to himself. Glad I’m not the only one with that takeaway.
Yeah, they wanted storage and enterprise level spam filters for free and used a bodge to get it. Google probably stopped that feature because they weren’t the only company doing that. I doubt the average consumer account was costing them much in that department.
Dude needs to pay for google workspace instead of using Gmail.com for his employees.
Yeah, didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that detail was quite absent from the blog post.
I don’t even use gmail professionally and I was still using that.
Some (terribly implemented) services don’t allow changing e-mail on their accounts, and I have stuff I subscribed to aeons ago with a mail I am not using anymore.
Not that I can’t connect directly to that old crappy mail provider, but it’s very inconvenient.
Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.
He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.
I think his reasoning about why not is rather understandable.
Wack
People using gmail in 2025 have no one to blame but themselves. Google backs a fascist and pedo-criminal administration.
Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine
Which means they’re actively backing fascists and pedos.
