This turned out to be a temporary glitch with GMail, but still an interesting one. I accidentally noticed it since all my email from my GMail account is routed to a “google@” address on a domain I use exclusively for email. For a few hours today, all emails sent from my GMail account to a “google” account on any of my domains were being bounced back. For example, sending an email to google@broobles.com bounced back with the following message:


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This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

google@broobles.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data
----


Sending an email to google1@broobles.com a few seconds later worked just fine. I was able to repeat this several times during the past few hours, however the issue now seems to be resolved. Obviously, I couldn’t perform too many tests, but I did try a few involving “google” and “gmail” and the only one that consistently failed was google@broobles.com.

I wonder what type of DNS server is used internally by GMail and why it had problems extracting a domain from an email address addressed to a “google” account on a valid domain.

Tags: GMail, Google, DNS, MX

Even though RSS has picked up greatly during the past year, there is a great amount of sites that still provide email newsletters only. While going through my email, I am usually not in the “news” mode, so my news folder is full of unread mail. In order to deal with this I moved all of my newsletter subscriptions over to MailFeed, so I can scan them fastly in my RSS reader when my mind is open to all sorts of news.

MailFeed is a new service (beta of course), perfect for subscribing to newsletters or email notifications and reading them in your RSS reader. All emails sent to something@mailfeed.org are available via RSS on http://mailfeed.org/rss2/something which you can subscribe to from any aggregator. Note that some web aggregators, such as Bloglines, offer a similar feature, but you can access these only from that specific aggregator (or a reader that can sync with them). Even better, MailFeed does not require you to register at all and you can use as many email addresses as you want, which allows you to simulate plus addressing found in regular email services.

The fact that you don’t have to subscribe to MailFeed leads to some privacy issues and you should be aware of them before starting to use the service.

Tags: MailFeed, RSS Email

Ted Leung posts an interesting view on impacts of recent developments of GMail and Yahoo! Mail:

Just when we finally achieved “model-view separation” for e-mail (IMAP and IMAP clients), the webmail world smashed those things back together. If Gmail and Yahoo start a competition around innovations in e-mail client features — something we’re desperately in need of — it reduces my ability to get the features I want because my mail data, my mail address, and the user interface for mail are not just bundled together, they’re welded together.

I can’t agree more. Flexibility to manage emails and email related data the way we want, together with reliability, should be the essence of every email system/setup. You want to have access to your email wherever you are, pull emails from different accounts including your own domains (even “host” them via MX records if you wish), be able to handle each one of those through a single interface (using different identities, signatures, etc). You also want to be able to easily back up messages or transfer them to another place if the need arises, synchronize with other accounts, easily import and export address books (what ever happened to writable LDAP?). Not to mention efficient and flexible spam blocking, rules, forwarding, alerting, searching…

GMail and Yahoo! Mail have attractive features but lack complete openness. For example, GMail doesn’t allow you to export your contacts (!?) and Yahoo makes external fetching of messages a cumbersome task for non-paying users (I’m talking about fetching into external accounts, such as regularly getting your Yahoo mail into GMail and the like). I guess we have to expect such things from free services. They need to keep you locked in. Free webmail is never free.

However, specialized (non-free) email services, such as FastMail.FM, Runbox or MailSnare do offer full flexibility. You are a paying customer and your mail is your mail. Their goal is to keep you as a customer and they do it by providing advanced and useful tools to boost your email experience. And yes, all of them provide IMAP, which, as Ted nicely puts it, allows a neat model-view separation.

As strange as it may sound nowadays, my email experience is almost spam free. I have to thank Fastmail.FM for implementing Sieve filtering and SpamAssassin in their excellent email service, which made this possible.

However, as another level of protection I’ve been using SpamGourmet. This is a fantastic, transparent system that just loves spam. It “eats” it. Once you create an account, whenever you face one of those “Please enter your email address” in places where there’s no need for it, or the site looks suspicious, just enter an address of type someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com, where someword is a word of your choice, x is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (for example 3) and user is your username. The first 3 messages sent to this address will be forwarded to your account, all subsequent messages will be “eaten” by spamgourmet. The whole process is transparent, which means you never ever have to visit spamgourmet again (no-brainer mode). Very elegant! Of course, you can use the advanced mode if needed which provides more flexibility, but does require some maintenance.

So, before you submit your real email to a suspicious site again, open an account with SpamGourmet and let it eat the spam before the spam eats you.

Tags: SpamGourmet, Spam

OK, so you’ve become a proud owner of an internet domain. You’ve built your website and also setup the email service so that you can send and receive messages from/to [you]@[yourdomain]. You’re all excited and everything seems to be perfect. That is, until people start telling you the email they sent you bounced back, or even worse, start asking why haven’t you replied to that important message they’ve sent. Well, you never recieved it. So you start scratching your head…

This post will explain what is happening in the background and how to fix the problem (for free). Don’t be discouraged by the length of the post, the process is quite simple.

When you setup your domain email you generally either forward it to another email address (FastMail, GMail, Yahoo, your ISP, etc), or you decide to take full control and go for the more advanced solution - host your own email, either at your webhost or on your own home machine. I’ll leave the forwarding case for another post and discuss the hosting solution here. So, the main question is, what happens when your mail server (or webhost) is down?

Very simplified, when someone sends an email to [you]@[yourdomain], the sending server checks the MX (Mail Exchange) DNS records for [yourdomain]. This record tells the sender where the email for [yourdomain] should be sent to. It gets the first one, resolves its IP address and tries to send the email to that server. All is fine if the server is up. Sometimes however, your server will be down for maintenance or other reasons and the sending server will either store the message and try again later or just discard the message completely. Huh, not exactly what you wanted!. So, how do you prevent this?
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