not the customer but the product

[cellio]

There's apparently another widespread Gmail outage, but this one is more harmful -- it's lying to senders about addresses being invalid (permanent error).

This might be the swift kick in the rear that I needed to figure out a different approach to email. I have a domain, so I should set up a single "collector" address there to receive everything I'm currently forwarding to Gmail (which I'll have to hunt around for; Pobox is easy but not the only one). I hadn't done that before because I thought that relying on Google (a huge, hardened service) was a safer bet than relying on my domain -- what happens if my domain gets hijacked, my hosting company compromised, etc? Rethinking that now...

Fortunately, I'm already forwarding Pobox to an address on my domain, a backup for Gmail, so I probably haven't lost anything. But I might be getting silently dropped from mailing lists I cared about. We'll see.

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Ok, I think I now have everything going to one mailbox on my domain and, from there, mirrored to Gmail for now. I'd like to have all my mail in one place, but the last download of my Gmail mailbox was a 10G file in mbox format, which I don't know how to read or plug in to something else. (I mean, obviously that's a standard format, but what can I use on my Mac to read it?) I don't really want to store all that on my domain server long-term (it'd raise my storage costs), but there's probably a lot of junk in it, mixed in with the stuff I care about. I'd already done some passes to, for example, nuke years-old mailing-list threads that I don't care about now, because Google has storage limits, but that's time-consuming.

I welcome input from people who've wrangled large mailboxes, domains, and email more generally.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

It's difficult to hit backend servers with a DoS attack, since they aren't supposed to be visible to the Internet. There may be ways to do it, especially if insiders are involved. I'm more inclined (based on hardly any information, so take it for what it's worth) to think that either malware or a coding error caused the backend to falsely respond with "no such mailbox." Under normal circumstances, I'd expect Google's software to know the difference between "no such mailbox" and "mailbox temporarily unavailable" and return the appropriate error message.