It's ironic that Google spend an awful lot of money to promote Open Source participation through programmes such as Google Summer of Code, and yet it is Google that has prevented my participation in a number of Open Source communities.
A while ago, I switched all my mail over to using Google Mail (Virtual domains, Google Apps, Google Apps take 2, Mail update). Unwittingly, in doing so I nuked my ability to send email to Open Source mailing lists.
Due to the organic growth of both my use of email accounts and participation in communities, I'm subscribed to various mailing lists under a wide range of addresses. For example, I started participating in the Cocoon community with an old work email address; when I became a committer and later a member, I started using my Apache email address.
One of the neat features about Google Mail (in lieu of being able to actually consolidate multiple Google Mail accounts) is the ability to add multiple email addresses to one account. The idea is to let me use my foo@bar.com Google Mail account to send emails as x@y.com, as long as I also own the x@y.com email address. This should in theory allow me to transparently keep communicating on lists as before, by simply adding all my subscribed email addresses.
The problem is, Google have implemented this feature in a way that leaves it badly broken for real-world use, and although your emails purport to be from x@y.com, it still remains clear that they originated from foo@bar.com. A more technical discussion of the problem appears on Torsten's post about Gmail Sender header.
Why does this matter? Any email I send to mailing lists will probably bounce (especially Apache lists), as I'm subscribed as x@y.com, and the list server only sees foo@bar.com. If I can't send emails to the lists, I can't participate in the discussions (for example the recent vote on releasing cocoon 2.1.11).
It gets worse than that. Any email I send to anyone using Microsoft Windows and Outlook will show up as "From: x@y.com on behalf of foo@bar.com". Imagine if I'm trying to send an email:
From: a.savory@professionalbusinessaddress.com
To: reallyimportantcustomer@theirbusiness.com
Subject: important business message
and what the recipient really sees is:
From: silly@stupidaddress.com on behalf of a.savory@professionalbusinessaddress.com
To: reallyimportantcustomer@theirbusiness.com
Subject: important business message
Ouch.
For years I ran my own mailserver, and was able to configure it so that I was trusted enough to specify my own From: address. I'd kinda expect Google's feature to work the same way. It's trivial to do.
I'm now faced with a tough choice: set up new Google Mail accounts for each of the email addresses that I want to use to participate on mailing lists (bearing in mind some lists and some work obligations require me to use certain addresses), ditch Google Mail in favour of a service that works as expected, or go back to running my own server. None of those options are particularly enticing.
Why am using Google at all? I'm pretty sure it's the best (or least worst) of a bad lot (yes, I have Hotmail, Zimbra and Yahoo accounts too).
Any suggestions welcomed.
Technorati Tags: apache, gmail, google, open source
Posted by savs at January 10, 2008 5:50 PMI am running my own SMTPS server on vafer.org which does the secure relaying for all my email addresses. For the receiving part I use Gmail/Google Apps. That means I don't have to worry about spam filtering and the MX too much. When I am traveling without a laptop I can still check mails online. As I use my laptop as main mail storage
Essentially I only use Gmail as a glorified POP server. While there is one to cross off the list (that would be IMAP) I am still not seeing myself to hop on the Gmail train again.
...especially as with the stupid headers there isn't really a way around the SMTP server for me.
Posted by: Torsten Curdt at January 10, 2008 10:02 PMTo be honest, the reason you can't post to apache mailing lists is because EZMLM (the mailing list manager apache uses) is utterly, completely, totally, irrevocably broken.
Posted by: Thom May at January 11, 2008 11:11 AMThe really stupid thing is, it's only with their webmail that it's a problem. If you send via their smtp server, provided you authenticate you can use your own address and it behaves as expected.
I (because i am horrible geek) no longer use the website to read email, and only send and receive on my iPhone, so it's no longer a problem for me... but then i don't send very many emails.
Posted by: John at January 12, 2008 12:43 PM