Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (from that time) Are you trying to imply that 'mail servers' are some sort of ancient devices whose era has come and gone?
The days when every company maintained its own mail server are gone (and on the whole we're better off).
How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
151–159 of 159 posts
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#152People 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.c…
There may also be liability when you leave the job as you're retaining copies of data that doesn't belong to you. Not to mention that in the case of a lawsuit you might be required to give access to relevant emails. Mixing personal and professional accounts could quickly get messy.
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#153People 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.c…
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 transi…
Your comment about security is extremely disturbing. You're right people can intercept it, however, if I send an e-mail to someone at a company and they forward it to their personal account, that's the minute I stop doing business with that company.
I get the appeal of combining them, but it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
Read underwater's comment as well. He has some good points.
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#154People 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.c…
> 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? If you configure your GMail account correctly, it will reply via the other account's own SMTP servers. There will be no evidence of your private GMail account, even in the headers. (This is not the same thing as just configuring GMail to set a particular "F…
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#155People 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.c…
Most startup founders do not have a separation of business and personal life or have very little separation. When setup properly outgoing emails will be sent from the correct address. There are no security concerns, someone can easily download all their mail if they're trying to get a copy.
If they're simply creating something to make some extra money then sure you could use the same account, but to be taken professionally you should keep them separate.
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish we could get these anti-spam zealots to apply the same effort to stopping junk postal mail. The history of direct mail is interesting and perhaps instructive. It has been kept alive by those who do the delivery (cf. those who do the sending). I have sometimes wondered if the same might be true for email. If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP s…
This is not a workable solution because the problem is not based on what port SMTP is running on. Organizations and ISPs voluntarily subscribe to email blacklists because they are desperate for any help in reducing spam volumes. They would filter email coming from blacklisted IPs regardless of what port it came in on. You're basically proposing a whitelist solution, which has many known problems: it does not scale we…
Then we are free to do our SMTP of other messaging as we desire. Each connected machine can choose what ports it wants to listen on, if any.
And what if this does not need to scale? What if it's only being used for a small group of people? What if all the people know each other? A very specific but very common use case. Not everyone is a celebrity with a gazillion "friends". Nor is everyone constantly conversing with new acquaintances. Some people have old friends and family. So I've heard.
Is it worth the spammer's time to try to find an SMTP daemon for each indivdual email address? Under the current system, things are centralized enough that a spammer can spam hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of recipients via sending to a single SMTP daemon.
Spammers have to send enormous amounts of spam to be successful. Having to do extra work to find an SMTP daemon just to send email to one recipient, and have to do this repeatedly, seems like it would not be worth a spammer's time. At least, not when it's so easy to just spam people that are using email the usual way: allowing some third party to handle their mail.
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The days when every company maintained its own mail server are gone (and on the whole we're better off).
As we converge on a handful of major email providers, are we really much better off? Would you be singing the same song of Hotmail a decade ago, or is it just because Google seems to be the Monopoly with a Heart of Gold?
Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 transi…
Ok, so I'm sure you won't mind then if you send an e-mail to csr@myhealthprovider.com with your latest lab results and someone replies from their personal Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo? More importantly, why would you have e-mails from multiple people in the different inbox's? If you're allowed to check your e-mail at work then keep your family/friends using your personal account and your business contacts using your work one.…
> ... it's sloppy and too many people take the easy way out instead of being professional.
My defense of the "many inboxes forwarding to one" scenario was not meant to cover every perceivable scenario. Obviously I would not advocate it in all situations and many situations would not be appropriate for that. If someone does not set it up right, I am not trying to defend that sloppiness.
An example of a good fit: someone who works part time at several companies, or the sole proprietor of a few businesses. If mail goes to CEO@ABC, replies are from CEO@ABC; mail to CEO@XYZ is returned by CEO@XYZ. If all of them are on Google Apps for Domains anyway, it is not a big deal, it's not less secure, and the owner of the e-mail address has less authentication and security overhead. Note that if you are mixing providers, like google apps and self-hosted mail, it gets much more complicated. In that case you are altering the physical security of that data.
Examples of bad fits: customer service, sales messages, bug tracking, official company broadcasts, and many others.
Regarding underwater's comment: obviously if the e-mail does not belong to you, you should not forward it somewhere other than the owner's server without the owner's permission.
Re-reading my comment, I should've mentioned that a shared mailbox is only appropriate in some cases.