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Is this some sort of abuse protection, where people use gmail as free storage?
by abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Is this some sort of abuse protection, where people use gmail as free storage?
- LeonM 6y agoGmail already is free storage, AFAIK it shares you data quota with you Google drive account. Most likely this is a 'mail-loop' prevention. If you setup two accounts that forward to each other, then emails will be stuck in an infinite loop. Inject a couple of multi-megabyte emails into that loop and you can take down the entire service. This is effectively a DOS attack.
- londons_explore 6y agoIt could also be an implementation detail. Mail messages have a unique identifier. Gmail might just concatenate the mail identifier with your account identifier to use it as a primary key to store your email in the "mails" bigtable. If you send email to yourself, when it comes to put the mail into the mails bigtable, the result will be "primary key already exists, cannot insert"
- prepend 6y agoMaybe similar to this, but it works if my message stays in gmail when I send from my gmail straight to my gmail.
- prepend 6y agoI don’t think so as email forwarding is pretty basic and it’s blocked even for tiny messages. I suspect it was just some stupid developer pre-optimizing, thinking they were clever and not thinking through use cases. “Every email from me to me will skip external routing and just get flagged in storage; therefore, any email from and to me and not through that process must be fraud and we’ll just save the user from that and black hole it.”
- kube-system 6y agoIIRC, at one point in time, there was a way to evade spam filtering by setting the “from” and “to” to the recipient. Maybe this has something to do with that
- prepend 6y agoPerhaps but this is where gmail is being stupid as they should be able to authenticate that the message actually was genuinely generated from a gmail account.