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Here are some things that people will suggest that are unacceptable:
Have the dnalounge.com MX record point to some Google thing and let them take over 100% of my company’s email. Fuck no. Also it wouldn’t integrate with our internal systems, store, transactional emails, bounce processing, etc.
Why is that unacceptable? “Fuck no” is not a reason for it being unacceptable, and having to build out integrations when things change is part of the job.
You want business email? Well you host it yourself, pay someone to manage it in house, or pay someone to manage it externally. Using loopholes to get free end-user emails was bound to stop working eventually; just pay for Google workspaces, keep the same familiarity for your employees and now have heightened control over how Google uses your data.
What a damn moron to both have this setup and the audacity to complain that it will stop ‘working’.
Who in their right mind would channel all his employee email through Google? That shit gets scraped the hell out off.
He’s being a bit whiny here. He was having employees use Gmail as a client for his self-hosted POP mail, which is a niche use case that likely has a brittle implementation and doesn’t make any money for Google. Gmail offers a paid product for this kind of use case, but it won’t integrate with the rest of his (likely custom) automation. He wants to self-host parts of the system and have Google do the messy bits, but he’s not their customer and probably isn’t a very good product either.
He then complains that to self-host IMAP:
My server is now responsible for storing all of their messages, including all of their spam. It is a vast amount of data. I will have to implement quotas.
It’s 2025 and that’s a silly claim. A 12Tb HDD costs the same as a couple bottles of booze, and it’s not hard to write a script that clears out spam after 30 days. The other complaints are basically UX.
Normally saying a small business owner should self-host IMAP and write scripts would be a bit unreasonable, but this is JWZ.
Just going to start this off by saying I have little to no sympathy for this guy’s situation.
While the situation does suck (and this is how I found out I’m losing this feature too), we can’t really be surprised that Google is finally getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT. Eventually, security must move forward and ditch laughably insecure methodologies, and this does mean peoples’ workflows will get broken. But if we kept bad shit around because removing it negatively affects someone’s workflow, we’d never get anywhere.
And on topic of the article, this dude is sitting in a pool of shit of his own making. From the comments:
I’m not “sticking with them” in any way, it is that my staff are statistically average humans and therefore their preferred email addresses end in gmail dot com.
I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin. Being the company IT guy means making internal tools available, making them easy enough to use, and making people use it. He says that the staff is “statistically average”, which means they should be smart enough to use a company mail service and not facilitate his users to use a free 3rd party service to kludge shit together.
One of the gigs I was at used Kerio Connect as their self hosted email solution, and you know what? Even the below average users could figure it out without having to hook into a Gmail account.
This dude is trying to bubble gum and duct tape his orgs mail flow with below sub par methods and complains about it breaking, all because he couldn’t be bothered to push back and not hook their company email into Gmail. Don’t be surprised you’re in a circus when you’ve got clowns running your infrastructure.
I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin.
FWIW, just to avoid Dunning-Kruger and because I think you are mistaken here: jwz
I can only assume that he has rather hand-crafted scripted workflows though.
Being good in one thing doesn’t make you good in something else. He is an inexcusably bad IT admin. The devs I work with don’t ask for my opinion on code and if they would, it would probably sound nice to someone who doesn’t know shit, but it’d still be a dumb opinion. Likewise I don’t ask for their opinion on how to create our IT infrastructure (beyond of course asking their requirements for testing servers and such). If they have an opinion on it, it’s generally not very coherent or founded in reality. Like the complaints of this guy. Though they’re generally not this dumb.
Like I said, dude knows his stuff. But I admin for a living, and if I worked with him, I’d be giving him 7 flavors of shit daily for these kinds of decisions.
These things work for small shops and small teams, but they don’t scale well and just lead to this kind of headache. And it’s awful for everyone who needs to help support it. And I know that, because I’ve been in those shoes more than once (and on both sides of it).
Really they closed a loophole that allowed them to have Enterprise level email features for free.
I sympathize that none of the paths forward are ideal, but when you use loopholes (especially ones that store your employees passwords in plain text???) expect things to eventually break.
You used a bodge to make your life easier, now the bodge is broken and you have to pick up the pieces.
Dude needs to pay for google workspace instead of using Gmail.com for his employees.
Wack
People using gmail in 2025 have no one to blame but themselves. Google backs a fascist and pedo-criminal administration.
Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine
