47 ms·
How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
i.e. beware creating an email black hole.
- tghw 14y agoI 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.
- spindritf 14y agoThat's clever but you can just match is:spam and never send those to spam, essentially turning off the spam filter, not bypassing it. Matches: is:spam Do this: Never send it to Spam
- tghw 14y agoUnfortunately, 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?
- akkartik 14y agoIt's worked for me for years: http://i.imgur.com/bUB3u.png http://i.imgur.com/bUB3u.png
- tghw 14y agoOdd. I've never gotten it to work. I tried again today just to see if they may have changed that, but still gives me the error.
- akkartik 14y agoI think I remember seeing the message actually. You just blow past it and setup the filter, and it'll work, I think.
- Hurdy 14y agoThis 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.
- epikur 14y agoIs that the same as marking things "Not Spam"? As in, does it lower the quality of Gmail's spam filter?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aprescott 14y agoI 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.
- vl 14y agoA lot of people forward their email through gmail account exactly because of this feature - to filter out spam, since gmail filter is one of the best.
- jimstr 14y agoI 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.
- keiferski 14y agoThe title is a bit hyperbolic, and would more accurately be "Check your spam box for important emails".
- niggler 14y agoThat'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.
- keiferski 14y agoFair 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.
- recoiledsnake 14y agoGoogle'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.
- rabidsnail 14y agoI'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?
- niggler 14y agoI dont think this is a good idea -- if ec2 goes down (as it has in the past) you risk losing email
- rabidsnail 14y agoI 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.
- notatoad 14y agoSMTP 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.
- ams6110 14y agoSMTP does sometimes just drop messages, it's not a protocol that guarantees delivery
- aed 14y agoGmail's handling of multiple accounts is just about the poorest I've seen in any email client. Even Microsoft Outlook handles multiple accounts better!
- ebcase 14y agoMailplane 3 (for Mac) is a great solution to this problem — http://beta.mailplaneapp.com/kb/getting-started/welcome-to-mailplane-3 http://beta.mailplaneapp.com/kb/getting-started/welcome-to-m...
- DeepDuh 14y agoHow about Mail.app?
- pkamb 14y agoThe 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.
- gabemart 14y agoWhere 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.
- krakensden 14y agoI have a client company who uses exchange, it generates that line, instead of the more old school On Oct 99, 2012, at 3:33 PM, KrakensDen yawped:
- mmastrac 14y agoIf you want to do this reliably, don't use the GMail auto-forward stuff. Instead, create yourself a _filter_ with the following definition: Matches: -{"X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*"} Do this: Skip Inbox, Forward to XXX, Delete it Your other GMail account will take care of the spam that gets forwarded. I've been doing this for more than a year, with nothing ending up in the account's Spam folder.
- 7a1c9427 14y agoI 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.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoWould 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.
- ams6110 14y agoPersonally 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.
- pyre 14y agoThe 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).
- beering 14y agoJust check two different accounts. You don't gain much by forwarding from one to the other, but the potential to screw up is higher.
- Nux 14y agoYou don't even need to do much, GMail top posts by default without a way to disable this retarded behaviour.
- DanBC 14y ago> this retarded behaviour. 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.
- phpnode 14y agoCome 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
- DanBC 14y agoI'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?)
- prodigal_erik 14y agoSexual 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.
- songgao 14y agoI 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.
- thrownaway2424 14y agoIf 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.
- pearkes 14y agoI use Chrome's incognito feature to manage multiple email accounts. My work Google account goes in an incognito window, personal Google account goes in the standard window. I've found this works really well, and the different colors help my mind remember which environment I'm in.
- thrownaway2424 14y agoDid 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.
- aidos 14y agoYou 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.
- pearkes 14y agoThey 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.
- raldi 14y agoWhat bugs did you run into? I've been doing it for over a year and can't think of any that I've encountered.
- pearkes 14y agoWhen 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.
- sbierwagen 14y ago"Man Fucks Up Email Configuration, Blames Gmail" If only HN had mods, who could perhaps edit linkbait titles.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoDid you read the article? He didn't blame Google. He blamed himself [1][2] and alerted others to a mistake he made that they might make too. [1] "So what I realized is that I had made a fatal mistake by forwarding my email" [2] "But, I’m not trying to blame Google for this" Edit: Also, the title doesn't blame Gmail either. "How to use Gmail..." implies that it's something you the user can do not something Gmail does.
- AceJohnny2 14y agoor more truthfully: Man fucks up mail configuration in a non-obvious way, does not blame Gmail.
- lucb1e 14y agoYes, 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...
- paulrademacher 14y ago> 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- philip1209 14y agoDoes 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?
- thrownaway2424 14y agoThese kind of "catch-all" domain forwarders are a terrible idea.
- msh 14y agoUse a Google Apps account to host mx for all the domains, no need to use forwarders. It's what I do.
- bosch 14y agoPeople 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?
- MiguelHudnandez 14y agoGmail 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.
- Encosia 14y agoUnless 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.
- staunch 14y agoI keep two tabs open, one for work and one personal. First I login to: https://mail.google.com/ https://mail.google.com/ Then I login to https://mail.google.com/a/domain.com https://mail.google.com/a/domain.com Works great if you do it like that, better than if you try clicking "Switch accounts" or whatever.
- notJim 14y agoThe switching accounts thing adds a url param too, although it's kind of a drag because the accounts will switch if you log in in a different order.
- durkie 14y agowhy did he receive the "wanted to check in one more time" email? strange that he missed the initial email, but then received the second one.
- mylittlepony 14y agoA little bird told me about something called Thunderbird.
- statictype 14y agoDid it tell you that Thunderbird is seeing its sunset?
- mylittlepony 14y agoIt just works. I don't need new features.
- stretchwithme 14y agoFor 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.
- hybrid11 14y agoA 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.
- eisa01 14y agoThe spam filter in Gmail is too aggressive. I've actually gotten interview confirmations in my spam folder (!), which I was lucky to notice. And I just checked my spam folder and found three legitimate emails. They were from Linked in, glassdoor and HBO. Google really needs to improve. edit: Make that Udacity as well..
- disgruntledphd2 14y agoSorry 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.
- orangethirty 14y agoAfter 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.
- rbanffy 14y agoWhy 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.
- ww520 14y agoThe 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.
- pyre 14y agoIf 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).
- iomike 14y agoWhy should anyone invest in you, when you can't figure out Gmail?
- iomike 14y agoWhy should anyone invest in you, when you can't figure out Gmail?