this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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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:
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.
Not to mention that he's complaining about an SPF record for his own domain. Dude, change your SPF record.
I think this is a case of "knows enough to be dangerous".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
I mean, you can draw the line wherever you want, but I expect that he probably knows more about mail than the average bear.
This guy should be smart enough to realize he's complaining about not getting free storage from Google. You can't just run a business off other people's infrastructure and expect it to work out without any business agreement or contract. Google Workplace is a thing, and it sounds like this guy is just cheap if he won't pay for either it or his own harddrives.
I've read through the post and the comments again, and it's also that he doesn't seem to want to train his users. They're familiar with Gmail so he wants them to be able to use it. His users probably use their mailbox as an archive, and he doesn't want to train them into understanding this is a bad idea, and he doesn't want the hassle of dealing with ever increasing mail storage. At my previous job, we had Exchange Online, so 50 GB of storage. I was still explaining to my users, they should store their handled mails in archives if they wanted to be sure they would always have them. (Obviously stored on parts of their hard drives set up to synch to the fileserver which had daily backups)
All of these things are normal parts of an admin's responsibilities. The only reason he's getting away with his setup is because he owns the business and there's been nobody there for the past 20 years to explain this would lead to problems down the line. (Or if there have been, he's conveniently ignoring that)
Now they're here, he's blaming Google for what is probably the least evil thing they've done this year.