

How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers - onecreativenerd
http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Dont-Forward-Google-Apps-to-Gmail.html
i.e. beware creating an email black hole.
======
tghw
I 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
That'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
Unfortunately, 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
It's worked for me for years: <http://i.imgur.com/bUB3u.png>

~~~
tghw
Odd. 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
I think I remember seeing the message actually. You just blow past it and
setup the filter, and it'll work, I think.

------
bosch
People 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
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.

~~~
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.

------
thrownaway2424
If 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.

------
paulrademacher
> 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.

------
mmastrac
If 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.

~~~
dylanvee
What kind of magic expression is that?

~~~
koko775
<http://www.eicar.org/86-0-Intended-use.html>

It's designed to be automatically flagged as a virus, without actually being a
virus. I found this with a simple Googling; you can too!

------
keiferski
The title is a bit hyperbolic, and would more accurately be "Check your spam
box for important emails".

~~~
niggler
That'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
Fair 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.

------
aed
Gmail's handling of multiple accounts is just about the poorest I've seen in
any email client. Even Microsoft Outlook handles multiple accounts better!

~~~
pkamb
The 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
Where 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
I 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:

------
mike-cardwell
Would 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
Personally 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
The 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).

------
rbanffy
Why 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.

------
7a1c9427
I 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.

------
pearkes
I 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.

~~~
aidos
You 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
They 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
What 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
When 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.

~~~
jrockway
You're talking about Google's multi-login, which allows you to log into Google
with multiple accounts. This thread, however, is about _Chrome's profiles_ ,
which lets you open multiple browser windows each with a different profile
(i.e. cookies, Google account, extensions, etc.).

~~~
pearkes
I was responding to:

>You 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.

------
sbierwagen
"Man Fucks Up Email Configuration, Blames Gmail"

If only HN had mods, who could perhaps edit linkbait titles.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Did 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.

------
songgao
I 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.

------
beering
Just check two different accounts. You don't gain much by forwarding from one
to the other, but the potential to screw up is higher.

------
staunch
I keep two tabs open, one for work and one personal.

First I login to: <https://mail.google.com/>

Then I login to <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
The 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.

------
eisa01
The 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
Sorry 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.

------
ww520
The 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
If 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).

------
orangethirty
After 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.

------
stretchwithme
For 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.

------
philip1209
Does 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?

~~~
msh
Use a Google Apps account to host mx for all the domains, no need to use
forwarders. It's what I do.

------
lucb1e
Yes, 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...

------
hybrid11
A 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.

------
iomike
Why should anyone invest in you, when you can't figure out Gmail?

------
durkie
why 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.

------
Nux
You don't even need to do much, GMail top posts by default without a way to
disable this retarded behaviour.

~~~
DanBC
> _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
Come 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
I'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
Sexual 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.

~~~
DanBC
Sexual orientation and skin colour are still used as insults even though
sensible people agree that it's stupid to do so.

> I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way

I have no problem with people saying "This decision is dumb" or "This decision
is stupid" or "This decision is idiotic". I do have a problem when people say
"This decision is retarded" because that's not general stupidity, it is linked
specifically to people with learning disabilities.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Some, maybe all, of those words used to be diagnoses of intellectual
disabilities. I don't think laymen distinguish them much at all; I was never
taught to do so. If the goal is to deter everyone from showing contempt for
lack of intelligence (though I don't think that's going to happen) I don't see
another word with the same connotation as progress. Am I overlooking
something?

~~~
DanBC
The goal is not to deter people from showing contempt for lack of intelligent
action. (Unless that contempt is for someone who lacks intelligence because of
a disability). When someone does something stupid it is fine to call them
stupid.

The goal is to ask people to consider using words that are not recently (even
currently) used for learning disabilities. Retard has strong links with
learning disabilities. Enough time has passed that words like 'moron' has
little connection to its original meaning.

In time retard will have enough distance from its current use to be less
hurtful.

>I don't see another word with the same connotation as progress.

I don't understand.

~~~
im3w1l
What is the difference between being retarded due to a disability, and being
stupid due to genetics?

Is it just a difference of degrees? I mean both are cases of "factor outside
of individuals control -> (extremely) low intelligence"

~~~
DanBC
A learning disability tends to be defined by IQ (IQ less than 75 or so),
rather than anything else.

Thus, someone with a chromosomal disorder, or someone who was deprived of
oxygen during birth, or someone who is just stupid because of genetics all
have learning disabilities. They just have different forms of learning
disability.

------
recoiledsnake
Google'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
I'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
I dont think this is a good idea -- if ec2 goes down (as it has in the past)
you risk losing email

~~~
icebraining
You can set up a different mail server with a lower priority. I run my own
server on a VPS, but have Google Apps' SMTP server as backup for those cases,
and it's been working fine for months.

~~~
danielweber
I have experienced, many times, people sending mail to the lower priority SMTP
server despite the primary being fully online.

~~~
quicksilver03
In my experience, the only ones doing that are spammers which assume that a
secondary SMTP has no antispam filters configured.

------
mylittlepony
A little bird told me about something called Thunderbird.

~~~
statictype
Did it tell you that Thunderbird is seeing its sunset?

~~~
mylittlepony
It just works. I don't need new features.

