Dave Winer, like Linus Torvalds, noticed something strange was happening to his e-mail, which led him to figure out what was going on.
On Wednesday I wrote about a problem I’ve been seeing with GMail, or so I thought. Messages that I knew I must be getting were not showing up in any of my mailboxes in GMail. But when I searched for them, they would show up.
I heard from other people who had seen the same behavior.
And I heard from two people from Google who work on GMail, who asked all the right questions. And gave me really detailed instructions on how to help them debug this.
Creepy.
I don’t know if I’d call it “creepy”; if you choose to enable “iCloud Keychain Sync” on an iPhone and a Mac connected to the same Apple account, it’ll automatically set up all e-mail/calendar/etc accounts on the linked devices. This is documented in the product page, the FAQ, and a whole bunch of other places. If I recall correctly, it’s even in a modal popup when you enable iCloud Keychain the first time.
It’s definitely true that the simplistic “Junk filter” in Mail.app is not as good as Gmail’s spam filter, but Mr. Winer comes off as a bit of a conspiracy nut to think that Apple built it to intentionally over-filter messages from a Gmail account.
Oh well that’s okay then; everyone always reads those, and Mac users never gloat at Windows users who end up accidentally installing software they don’t want because the installer was sneaky about it.
Every time Google royal fucks people, some Android fanboy came up with stupid “Apple is worst” excuses.
Apple is evil, yeah, but Apple doesn’t fuck with your email, doesn’t use your very private messages to show you ads or “enhance” your “web searching experience”!!!
C’mon why some smart people keep defending this horrible, privacy raping Google behavior?!?!
What Google does with people’s email is _WRONG_, We have to be clear, We must be all together against this shit.
I’m 100% with Thom here. THIS IS CREEPY. There’s no other word to describe it. Google shame on you.
PS: FYI syncing the keychain with icloud is a completely optional feature (and the keychain is encrypted btw). We cannot disable Google treachery sadly.
I don’t think you read the article.
I did. Maybe I’m getting your “creepy” thing wrong. O_o
Google messing with people’s email is creepy in my book. It’s always the same. Mysterious issues and Google Mail, oh surprise.
But hey, let’s blame Apple because… well they allows you to configure GMail accounts in Mail… mmm… yeah… evil Apple.
Linus Torvalds (posted in his G+ account)
Obviously it’s an Apple problem… oh my…
So okay, you clearly didn’t read the article.
Why you don’t explain your position instead of disqualifying mine?!?
Sorry If I’m too stupid but I don’t get your point, really.
You realise there are four links in the article? Did you try clicking on the last one and reading it? Because it doesn’t seem like it.
You actually use a free, third-party hosted EMail service for exchanging “very private messages”? Sorry to break it to you kid, but the problem there isn’t GMail…
I don’t use GMail at all. My point is: Google mess with people emails and that’s why they always have these kind of “mysterious” issues. As simple as that.
Goole USE people’s mails, they PROFIT with people’s privacy. They pretend to be good but they mess with your data (they know everything: what you search, what you write even what you talk in your freakin phone!). That’s why Google is a CREEPY creepy company like no other one in human history.
If you want to hide the sun with a finger and ignore reality blaming Apple for everything… great! Be happy. But let me tell you, that’s what fanboys do.
Really, they “always” have those kind of issues? I’m curious to hear how you managed to draw that conclusion, based on a sample size of 1.
You DO realize that there are many other EMail providers out there (free ones, even) and no one is forced to use GMail, right…? Again, those are only issues for the terminally-lazy/cheap/stupid. There’s also a really great trick that you can use to avoid those issues entirely – it’s called “don’t use GMail.” A radical idea, I know, but it’s crazy enough that it just might work!
It’s also obvious that you don’t work in any field even remotely related to IT, if that’s the worst thing about GMail that you can think of. Especially in the context of, say, GMail being probably the single largest source of SEO/web dev spam AND being one of the only large EMail providers that didn’t accept Spamcop reports (until a few weeks ago). Unlike the issues you’re whining about, that causes problems that can’t be avoided by simply not using Google’s services.
[q]If you want to hide the sun with a finger and ignore reality blaming Apple for everything… great! Be happy. But let me tell you, that’s what fanboys do.
Riiiight, as opposed to your approach of blaming Google for everything?
In fact this has been happening to my girlfriend’s Gmail account on her iPhone since at least 2013. I’m on google apps a.k.a. Gmail with your own domain (since 2009), and have never had this problem – that is, when I was still an iPhone user.
Poor UX, perhaps, but the real problem is the overzealous spam filter Torvalds pointed out.
Luckily for me, I’ve never trusted spam filters (if you have to monitor the spam bin, what’s the point?) and set up something more deterministic by setting up a custom domain name, handing out from_* e-mail addresses like revokable API keys, and adding GMail filters that say “If it came via my domain forwarder, it’s not spam. If it came directly to my GMail account, delete it. No exceptions.”
As soon as I have time, I’m going to switch to self-hosting e-mail so I can formalize the pattern even further with a milter that encodes the expected sender in the address, does deduplication if groups like SumOfUs get me on their list twice, etc.
In order to make this ‘creepy’ feature work you have to enable iCloud Keychain access on one of your devices, enter a code, then when you enable it on any other device your original device will be notified to let you know this is happening and you have to approve it and finally, upon successfully adding each device you get an email from Apple to let you know that a new device has been added to your iCloud account.
Oh and you also have to enable the synchronization of your email accounts in iCloud preferences.
But hey, yeah, if you totally forgot you did all that then it will surely seem creepy.
Linus Torvalds is an iCloud user then… He had the problem too. Sounds too strange to me.
But hey, thanks for the explanation now I understand Keychain was the “creepy” thing Thom was talking about… O_o (unbelievable!! haha)
The creepy part is that what you think you’re doing is syncing your passwords between devices, but what’s actually happening is that software you never use is logging in to your email accounts using those passwords and then screwing with your email.
It’s either creepy, or a terrible user experience, but take your pick.
Did you read the part where I mentioned you have to actually enable synchronization of your email accounts?
So a) you enable synchronization of your email and b) you enable synchronization of your passwords. This feature is as explicit as it gets.
No, you actually enable “iCloud Keychain Sync”. Which is in absolutely no way explicit and in no way suggests “Log in to my email and change things”
Also we’re talking about someone who allowed LinkedIn to access his email accounts (!) and then forgot about it. So I’m not sure the story is quite as mysterious as presented.
I don’t see the connection between Dave Winer’s case and Linus Torvalds’ case. The common thing is only that their emails disappear in their mailboxes. That happened to me also few times. Not recently but few years ago.
I don’t think Linus uses iPhone or Mac daily. As far as I know, he used only Apple hardware to put there Linux.
So this guy connecting two cases in his blog post is spreading FUD.
Let’s ignore what Linus Torvalds said and let’s blame Apple. This is OSNews!
Unbelievable…
As others have pointed out, accounts syncing via iCloud is a very obvious, publicized, opt-in feature. You literally can’t miss it. iCloud’s MFA + email confirmation is not comparable to the mess users can get themselves into clicking “Next” and “Agree” with some other software.
I’ll add that it makes perfect sense that OS X starts processing your (new) email right away, even if you don’t use the Apple Mail app, so that system notifications for email can be on by default even if you haven’t actually opened the app (yet). It’s part of that “Back to the Mac” philosophy, where the behavior you’d expect on mobile (background checking and notifications) makes sense on the desktop as well.
There is nothing creepy or malicious about this. But if you’re getting incorrect behavior out of the arrangement, here’s how to correct it:
• If you don’t want your Mac touching your Google account at all:
System Preferences:Internet Accounts — select the Google account and click the minus sign. You’ll be given the option whether to purge the account from iCloud or simply disable it locally.
• If you never use Apple Mail, but you still want other Google services sync’d to your Mac for whatever reason:
System Preferences:Internet Accounts — select the Google account and uncheck Mail from the list of services.
• If you use Apple Mail for Gmail (or if you don’t but you still want system notifications to appear) but you don’t trust Apple’s spam filter:
Mail.app:Preferences:Junk Mail — uncheck “Enable junk mail filtering”
I admit the fine-grained account controls are not immediately obvious. Kudos to Google for what sounds like exceptional customer support, though, and once Google tracks the problem back to Apple, Apple support could tell you what I just did.
Except that neither OS X nor iOS check your Gmail accounts in the background, because they do not support either imap idle or Google’s own sync methods. They will sync contacts and calendars via *dav protocols of course, but not your email. The only way either of these will sync your Gmail without having the mail app open is if you pay for a Google Apps account and support for the Microsoft EAS protocol which comes with it. There are only two ways to get background email on iOS with default apps: iCloud and Exchange. Mail.app on OS X won’t even sync those in the background properly.
My primary email address has been my .mac email since i got a mac in 2005 and i didn’t think they had spam filters considering the amount of crap spam i get through.
I can understand the clever stuff which bypasses the spam filters, but apple will happily deliver email to my mac account when the email address is something stupid like [email protected] and the subject is P5NNN!!!!! &&& and the contents are equally obviously spam.
Ive been complaining about the lack of spam protection in apples mail for years, it’s years behind Hotmail, Yahoo and Google.