Gmail Blog

AFAIK, Gmail doesn’t show it for all senders (2009): > This only works for some senders right now. We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-easy.html

It's within RFC, but they all lead to one email inbox so you end up being able to manage multiple third-party accounts from a single email account. It's recommended to not reject these, but strip them: https://gist.github.com/judge2020/af8fb9cd2ac165462d44de4e58d9a509 https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

A few people lost all their emails on Gmail in 2006. https://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email… There have been other Gmail outages in the past though. My two favorites are: 1. The multi-hour outage in 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html?eref=rss_us… 2. And one where they had to restore data from magnetic tape backups https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html… Of course, there are other email providers too and their own outages. But I like Gmail and that's what I follow.

My favorite part is that Google Now's email integration (which this likely builds off of) doesn't work with Apps accounts yet it does work with Yahoo and Outlook.com accounts [1]. [1]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/02/gmailify-best-of-gmail-without-gm…

This is one of my favorite features of GitHub, alongside reply by email to comment. Does anyone know how their beacons get around Gmail's tracking buster? (https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html)

E2E encryption has a very long way to go. If PGP or S/MIME were the answer it would had successes (conquered the world) by now. I do appreciate the security advocates preaching PGP, but in all fairness it may be a lost cause. Some security is better than none and so we should applaud google and others' initiative to improve the encryption at the transport (SMTP protocol) level, without too much involvement of the end-user. And hope more will follow, whatever it may be. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/02/making-email-safer-for-you-posted… https://openbit.eu/projekte/trusted-internet-services/

I ran an experiment years ago. I used a throw-away email along with plus-addressing [0] to register and receive updates from democrat, republican and a handful of media organizations. I knew what the results would be: Unmitigated mayhem. And that's exactly what I got. It was interesting to watch for a few months. All of these organizations shared (definitely) or sold (assumption) the customized email addresses far and wide. The only other possible explanations for what happened with these email addresses might be that they were stolen during a breach or that a bad actor with internal access shared or sold them. OK, I can buy either of these for one organization here or there, sure. When it happens across all organizations? No, the sharing or selling had to be intentional. There was no effective way to stop the stream of emails that resulted from a handful of registrations. From my perspective, clicking on "unsubscribe" only served to confirm the email address was good. In other words, perhaps it did unsubscribe you from that specific organization, yet, what you actually accomplished was to provide them with a validated "live target" email they could sell or provide to another organization. The result was an almost exponential growth of emails. Registering to, if I remember correctly, approximately six organizations led to a constant daily stream of emails form hundreds (did not count them) of groups. Crazy. I never set out to quantify any of this or run…

Excellent article -- despite (like others) disagreeing with several of his specific points, I think his overall take to optimize for predictability, readability, and simplicity is great. A few years ago I took over as tech lead at a previous workplace where the only tool they had used was C++ (really more like C with classes) with no use of the STL or other libraries they didn't build in-house. And this was for a hotel reviews and photos startup! At one point, in a few weeks we replaced 20,000 lines of horribly low-level C++ custom client and server code with 1000 lines of Ansible scripts. https://benhoyt.com/writings/using-ansible-to-restore-developer-sanity… I disagree with his point about foo_list and bar_dict suffixes. In Python it goes against the duck-typing philosophy (and in statically typed languages you definitely don't need them). You should be able to write a function that takes an iterable sequence, whether it's a list, set, or other container type. I think it's simpler to name "user_list" just "users", and if it's a dict, name it for what the keys represent, for example "users_by_id". As author of the article about that he linked to about escaping outputs rather than sanitizing inputs (https://benhoyt.com/writings/dont-sanitize-do-escape/), thanks for linking that. :-) The OP does provide some counterpoint to my article, but I think he glosses over the real issues here. I still believe it makes little sense to "sanitize" input generally (you actually…

> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.” I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused. First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name. They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc). Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away. Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device. Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client? Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my…

It does, and as usual, Apple catched up a decade later. It was called Google Image Proxy for GMail (or something like that) when it was released, much to the chagrin of email marketers. One of the earliest (2013) mentions I could find: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html Found in this old article about the initial launch: https://words.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-…

If I'm not mistaken, it's a Gamil specific feature. Any combination of words or numbers between + and @ is seen as not part of your email address but can be used by filter received emails. See this link for more information: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

While some companies filter against this, most email services support plus addressing to accomplish the same thing. You can register under [email protected], for instance, and all emails will still be delivered to [email protected] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo… https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exchange-onli…

2013 it seems there is blog about combining 10 GB gmail to 5 GB drive and Google+ Photos... https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/05/bringing-it-all-together-15-gb-no… Not sure if it was unlimited actually before this point.

Mail Goggles - apparently released in 2008[0]. I can't find it, so I don't think it exists anymore. [0] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you…

Nice, with pushdata, do you check if someone uses the same GMail account using GMail's "plus" and "dots" [0] features? (E.g. given [email protected], then [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc are all valid and points to the same address.) 0. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

Sure. + in particular is super common since 2008 when Google introduced it as a way to alias emails in Gmail. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

Indeed. The only time I have ever seen anyone restore from tape in case of real need was to recover a tiny fraction (< .02%) of files that software had mistakenly deleted. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html

Then use the `+` system on them and forward your emails wherever you want them to ultimately be stored. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo… Works on outlook.com addresses too.

In 2011, Gmail accidentally some people's email and restored it from tape. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html

I remember one big one. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html

If you use gmail you can attach + to your mail address. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo… This ignores the rest, you can program, cancel, block your emails based on that pattern. Works well enough.

> The problem is that even though "+" is a perfectly valid character, a lot of services don't accept it. did you know that the `.` character is also ignored? So you can actually devise a scheme where you put in dots into your email address (unfortunately, it has to be your email address, not any additional suffixes), and bypass these checks and filters. E.g., [email protected] is the same as [email protected] and for some extra fun, you can do both - add a unique set of dots to your email, and also add a `+` suffix, and if the service emails you without the `+` suffix, you know they deliberately filtered it out to spam you. See https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo… for details on it

Well, I’ve learned something, thanks. “ Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected]. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)” https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

Doesn't gmail already solve this problem? The way gmail solves it is by downloading all images in the email, even before you open the email. That means marketers don't know if you really opened the email. Gmail also downloads the images through proxy servers, so marketers won't know your ip address. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

He worked on Gmail at one point. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/03/faces-of-gmail-manu-cornet.html

This doesn't prevent creating unique names for the same image and sending a unique name per email. Apple's new approach hides the IP, but Gmail already does that[1], and they have more email market share, don't they? [1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Why do so many people responding to this seem to assume the plus sign is to fool spammers? Of course it's not useful for antispam. It's mostly meant to make it easier to trace where a (legit) email comes from, for example to set up filters. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-yo…

Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail. Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway. [0]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Gmail made changes years ago to proxy images to prevent leaking info like this. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

In 2011 a small amount (0.02%) of Gmail users had all their emails deleted due to a bug: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html They ended up having to restore them from tape backup, which took several days. Affected users also had all their incoming mail bounce for 20 hours.