[Alpine-info] Dumb Gmail questions

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, damion.yates at gmail.com wrote:


> *All opinions in this email are my own and this email is not endorsed by 

> my employer*

>

> [...]

>

> *I get about 500 spams in the Spam folder a day, and perhaps 5-8 spams a 

> month get to my inbox, I'm not sure why it's gone up to this in the past 

> few months, I'll probably raise a bug, it used to be far lower, maybe 1 

> every two months.

>

> I really did get the spam issue solved when I moved to gmail, I think 

> it's the best I've ever seen.


I agree wholeheartedly with that.  Prior to switching, I was getting about 
400-500 spam messages a day.  Gmail seems to outright discard a good 
portion of those (probably through setting up better SMTP controls, and 
definitely through better recognition of "splashback" spam [delivery error 
notifications caused by spam]).  The only false positives I've caught are 
list emails (where I'm not a direct recipient), and usually only when I've 
first joined a given list.  Maybe two actual spam messages a day or so 
slip into my inbox, but it's an easy 'x' '!' while going through my 
morning routine organizing and they're in my Spam folder.



> On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:

>

>> Plus, I use my own SMTP server (which prevents Gmail-SMTP's Outlook 

>> "Sent on behalf of" problem -- though I haven't tested that via webmail 

>> in a while).

>

> No idea what you mean, I've never seen that, is this just something 

> stupid Outlook does depending on the choice of headers used to send the 

> email where the domain/envelope sender can't match the DATA portion 

> From: part ?


That's kind-of the issue, yes.

It wouldn't be as big a deal for me, except my recent jobs have mostly 
been at Outlook-centric companies, where my emails show up as:

benizi at benizi.com on behalf of Benjamin R. Haskell

(when sent as bhaskell at company.example.com via Gmail webmail)

Outlook seems to be following the RFCs here (surprisingly).  It interprets 
a "Sender:" header that differs from the "From:" header in the way the 
RFC5322 example indicates it can:

""" (from: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.6.2 )
The originator fields indicate the mailbox(es) of the source of the 
message.  The "From:" field specifies the author(s) of the message, that 
is, the mailbox(es) of the person(s) or system(s) responsible for the 
writing of the message.  The "Sender:" field specifies the mailbox of the 
agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message.  For 
example, if a secretary were to send a message for another person, the 
mailbox of the secretary would appear in the "Sender:" field and the 
mailbox of the actual author would appear in the "From:" field.
"""

Gmail sets the "Sender:" header, which is reasonable, since there's no way 
to *prove* I'm the same person as the "From:" address that I've activated 
via email.  (I could well be the secretary, for example.)

In alpine, I've explicitly specified that I don't want the "Sender:" or 
"X-X-Sender:" headers.





>> The only other thing that is a clear win (IMO) for alpine is the 

>> ability to sort.  (Which is incredibly useful for sifting through my 

>> spam folder.)

>

> On very large folders under Google's IMAP, some sorts can be slow, like

> the threaded sort.

>

>> Searching isn't as blazingly fast via IMAP,

>

> I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.  I've found it to be 

> stunningly fast, even on a folder with 100s of thousands of mails!

>

> It's sort of freaky fast at times, certainly nothing like what I've

> experienced with any other IMAP daemon.


I thought I'd recalled performance issues with the following options that 
I've set in my alpine config:

       [ ]  Disable Regular Expression Matching For Alternate Addresses
       [X]  Mark for CC
Index Format = KEYINIT(1) STATUS MSGNO SHORTDATEISO TIME24 SUBJECT FROMORTO TO(12) SIZE

And indeed, disabling regexp's, not marking for CC, and using the default 
Index format got me down (without much testing) to 35 seconds for opening 
[Gmail]/All Mail.  (which still isn't usable, compared to <5 sec via 
webmail)

Though, you're right, maybe searching is about the same.

In alpine, ~5 seconds for ';' 't' 'p' alpine-info <CR>

vs.

In webmail, ~5 seconds for 'to:(alpine-info) OR from:(alpine-info)'

(...though much of the webmail time might be due to being on a netbook 
with a version of Firefox that has performance issues anyway [Gentoo's 
mozilla-firefox-bin 3.0.x series really crawls due to odd disk-I/O 
performance problems for me]... but I digress)

Best,
Ben