To geeks, it is a compelling attraction. Something cool and esoteric lives in there! All sorts of goodies to explore and configure.

To normal people, it is invisible. Normal people don't go pushing random icons on their apps because computers are fragile and may break if you do the wrong thing.

To me, it is a sign that product managers are a menace and must be stopped. A hundred thousand icons vying for your attention have been stuffed away because no one has the authority to prioritise user needs.

As a | user who has received some spam

I want to | easily report it as spam

So that | Google's AI can become ever stronger my inbox is easier to manage

How do you report spam? On the web, it is possible if you're prepared to enter the forbidden lair of ⋮. Click the one nearest the message and you'll see:

But there is no "report spam" button in the Gmail app. Try to find it. I promise you it isn't there.

No, not even behind the door of mysteries which is ⋮. See:

Ah ha! FOOLISH USER!! You thought that you could transfer a mastered skill from one environment to another? You are an idiot. A buffoon. The Eloi at Google mock your Morlock ways.

Here is the report spam button in the Gmail app - hidden in the top ⋮ menu!

And, just for completeness, here's what the top ⋮ on the web has.

Why?!

Why do the Monkey-Punchers at Google have such scorn for its users? Is it because their illegal monopoly means they don't have to compete for users? Do their perverse internal politics only reward employees for adding features, not removing them? Perhaps the web team and the app team are engaged in holy war around a doctrinal schism over icon placement?

We may never know.

OK, but why?

Why do the overflows on the web have icons but on the Android app they're barren?

Why is the order of the options completely different on both?

Why are the names different for the same functions?

We can only assume that the web team are Montagues and the app team Capulets.

What is going on?

Moving a UI from the big screen to the small screen is difficult. Some options aren't relevant in either context. Some labels are too big. Some prioritisation needs to happen. I accept that.

But users only have limited cognitive plasticity. They have a mental model of how a UI works and they expect it to be reasonably consistent.

I keep making the same mistake. Whether I'm on the web or app, I always go to the wrong option! This makes me feel like an idiot. I have a hundred apps to use, each with subtly different UIs - I can't be expected to keep them all straight. But I do expect the a common set of paradigms if the services are under the auspices of a single company.

Why are there two ⋮ menu options? I think the top relates to the conversation whereas the second relates to the specific message? But maybe I'm wrong.

Two out of three ain't bad

I lied earlier. There's a third way to report spam.

On the web, hover over one of the mysterious small icons - the ones with ridiculously thin lines and low contrast - and you'll be rewarded with this:

Make it make sense!!

At the time, they said:

organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service).

Google still offers the service - since renamed G-Suite, then Workplace, and next week to be renamed Google Plus for Work Home Edition Beta. But they're now going to charge people for it. Fair enough I guess⸮ Of course, Google don't offer a personal plan or a family plan - you have to sign up to an ENTERPRISE PLAN FOR SRS BZNIZ. Which is about £50 per user per year.

So, here's a quick(ish) guide to transferring your domain to a free* @Gmail.com account. * For now. Perhaps they'll start charging tomorrow.

Note: Obviously the better solution is to leave Google and go to Zoho, ProtonMail, or some other company. But some of us are used to the Gmail app or don't have the patience to run our own email server.

Table of Contents

• Sign up for a new Gmail account
• Import your mail
  • Or export / import
• Stop sending mail to Google
• Catch All
• 1. Forward your email
• 2. Check your email
• Send email from Gmail using your domain
• Summing Up
• Fuck You Google

Sign up for a new Gmail account

Go to Gmail.com and sign up for a new account. If your domain was example.biz then I recommend signing up for example.biz@gmail.com. That'll be easy to remember.

Just go through the usual sign up process. Remember to pick a strong password and to turn on 2FA.

Import your mail

Google offers a mail import feature. You can find it in "Settings".

There is some documentation for importing mail

Turn on POP in your old email. Then give your new Gmail account your old account's username and password. For example your.address@example.biz as the username, the server will be pop.gmail.com with port 995. And then your old password.

Note: If you have 2-Factor-Authentication turned on, you will either need to turn it off, or set up an App Specific Password. That will let Gmail log into Gmail to get your Gmail.

This process will take a long time - mine took about 24 hours. Oh, and you will find that Gmail will mark a bunch of legitimate email as spam. Better double check everything!

You'll also probably want to mark everything as "read".

Google doesn't make this stuff easy!

Or export / import

Apparently I have 3.5GB of data in my email. You can download it all via Gmail Export - or you can export via the admin tools.

I went via Google Takeout - which also allowed me to grab anything in Google Docs.

Note: This can take a while - but it is useful to have a backup. It took a couple of hours to generate mine.

Google doesn't support importing a Gmail export. Because they hate you and want you to suffer.

There is a command-line tool for restoring an MBOX backup to Gmail. I've not tried it though.

Stop sending mail to Google

If you set up Google Apps For Your Domain - your MX Records will be directing all email to Gmail's servers. You'll need to change that. Here's where things get tricky.

Log in to your domain management console. I can't tell you how to do this. You will need to go to something like "Zone Editor" where you'll see something like this: You will need to change all of your mail related records so that they point to your web-host's mail provider. Again, I can't help you with this. Speak to your hosting provider to find the details you need.

Catch All

You will need to set up a "catch all" email address - this is sometimes called "default routing". You want any email to @example.biz to be received rather than rejected.

You may need to set up a new username and password. Keep these safe - you may need them later.

Now your email is being received by your host. You have two options

1. Forward your email

This is harder to set up, but I find it to be quicker at delivering email.

Find the email forwarding set up with your domain provider. Set it so that every email to your catch-all is redirected to example.biz@gmail.com

That means each email to your domain will go to your new gmail address.

2. Check your email

This is simpler, but it does mean that your email isn't always delivered straight away.

Back in Gmail, go to settings, and select "Import mail and contacts" Give Gmail your catch-all email's address and password. Google will periodically check your mail and move it to your new Gmail account.

OK! You can now receive whatever@example.biz via Gmail! But what about sending?

Send email from Gmail using your domain

Follow the guide to sending Gmail using an alias. Basically, give them the username and password for the catch-all email address you created.

This will send email via your domain provider's mailservers.

You may need to set up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM on your domain. This is outside the scope of this article and you should speak to your domain provider.

Summing Up

1. Register a new Gmail address
2. Import your old email into your new address
3. Remove the Gmail MX records on your domain
4. Add MX records to point to your host's mailserver
5. Set up a catch-all email address
6. Forward all email to Gmail
7. Set up an email alias which sends via your mail servers

Fuck You Google

Google could have implemented this as a one-click solution. "Hey, if you don't want to pay, click here to transfer to a personal Gmail account. You'll lose all these great workspace features, but keep your email address."

They didn't. Which is a pity.

If you can, switch your email completely away from Google. If you can't, I hope the above is useful.

/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect

Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States).

Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well. Except in Gmail.

Here's my en_GB localised Gmail interface. Note how there is a folder called "Bin".

Everyone using Gmail in en_GB will know that deleted emails go into the "Bin".

Gmail has a handy search feature to allow you to find emails in a specific folder. For example "Bob in:spam" finds all email containing the word "Bob" in your spam folder. "Proposal in:sent" gets everything you've sent with the word proposal.

But it is impossible to search the "Bin" folder.

Why? Because you have to search the Trash folder. Because that's the names used by Americans.

/hɪˈdʒɛməni/

The same is true even if you've chosen a non-English language.

Sadly, Google don't respond to user complaints or feedback. The best you can do is hope a ranty blog post gets high enough traction on social media. Then, maybe, something will change.

Anti-virus warning – 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled.

Google, in its efforts to protect me from myself, have retroactively blocked certain filetypes from being downloaded.

If you try to forward the mail somewhere else, you get this error.

For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to use this type of file as it violates Google policy for executables and archives.

Here's how to circumvent their block.

1. Open up the message.
2. Click on the ⋮ on the top right of the message
3. Select "Show Original"
4. Select "Download original"
5. This will download a file called message.eml (Or whatever the subject of your email was).
6. Install the munpack tool using sudo apt install mpack (Or whatever arcane commands your OS uses).
7. Run munpack message.eml
8. Ta-Da! you will now see a message like AttachmentName.apk (application/vnd.android.package-archive) the blocked file is now downloaded.

I suppose it makes sense for your mail admin to block potentially harmful files. It's just annoying when I file I wrote myself, which I emailed myself, can't be retrieved by myself.

The original Android phone - HTC Dream - had 192MB of RAM. The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in a decade. Laptops have also leapt forwards in speed and memory. Sadly, no one on the Gmail team has noticed.

It's 2019, and Gmail app users are still seeing the dreaded "[Message Clipped] View entire message" error.

It's just as bad on the web version of Gmail - even on Desktop Chrome.

Google don't even do fancy AI magic to truncate these messages. You'd think they'd truncate at the end of a word. Or even in the middle of a word. They don't.

Nope, just slam straight through that HTML. YOLO!

What causes this? For unknown reasons, Gmail truncates messages at 102KB. That's about half the storage space of a floppy disk.

I'm talking 🖬, not 💾!

This is annoying for people sending newsletters - even the mighty MailChimp can do no more than offer some tips to shrink your latest newsletter.

Worse still, marketing emails know that if they pad out their messages, they can hide the unsubscribe link!

Oh, and as a bonus, if you click on "View entire message" - you get the old version of Gmail and Google's logo.

Google updated their logo in 2015. You'd think in the last four years, someone on the Gmail team would have received a long email and then filed a bug report. But no.

We can argue about whether emails should be chonkie-bois or not. But they are. People want full styling, images, and fancy features - not just ASCII text and the occasional uuencoded attachment. That's the world we're in now.

What can be done? There's literally no point me taking this up with Google. People have been complaining about this for over a decade and nothing has been done to fix it.

"User-focussed" my shiny metal arse.

So, here's a whinging blog post which - if I'm very lucky - won't make Google lock me out of my account again.

Bill Gates probably didn't say 640KB ought to be enough for anyone - but someone in the bowels of Google sure as hell believes 102KB ought to be enough for any email.

Recently, she added a note to her personal Google Calendar reading "Email alice@example.com to discuss pay rise" and set the date for a few months from now. She'd had a discussion with her boss, Alice, and they'd agreed to talk about salary later in the year.

A few moments later, Alice sent her a "Meeting Accepted" email.

What... The...?

Although pretty embarrassing, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been "Email mother-in-law@example.com with excuse why we can't see her" or perhaps "Email husband@example.com with divorce details" or even "Email co-worker@example.com to demand red stapler back" or... well, you get the picture.

Luckily, my wife doesn't have a Google+ profile, so there was no information leak other than her email address (which wasn't "huggle.wuggle.2012" or anything daft like that!)

We've tried several times to recreate this behaviour. Here's what we discovered:

• If you use Google Calendar on the web and put a Gmail address in the subject line, that user will have the event added to the calendar.
• They will not receive an email notification - although they will get a "meeting reminder" pop-up.
• Creating an event on an Android phone does not trigger a meeting request.
• Some non-Gmail addresses will also see the meeting in their calendar - but others will not.
• When you delete a calendar item, the "Cancellation" notification is emailed regardless of whether the user received the original invite.

We were unable to determine which non-Gmail addresses would receive the item in their calendar. Some which were hosted with Google didn't receive the pseudo-invitation. Some accounts hosted on Microsoft Exchange got the invite while others on seemingly similar systems didn't.

Here's a video showing it in action.

Note that when a user fills in the pop-up, Google Calendar asks for confirmation to send a meeting invite. When using the full interface, no warning whatsoever is given.

Impact

Google has tried to be clever here. It has failed. Just because I am talking about someone, it doesn't mean I am talking to someone.

There are two main risks here - the user could expose her private Gmail account and associated Google+ data, and she could also reveal her private thoughts and feelings.

Google really needs to work harder at protecting the privacy of its users.

Disclosure

This privacy issue was formally disclosed to Google on 6th January 2014. On 22nd January, they responded by saying they didn't consider it a problem.

We reviewed your report. After careful consideration by our security team, we feel that the issue has minimal impact on the security of our users. Let us know if you believe that this determination may be incorrect. If you'd submitted your report as part of our reward program, this means it doesn't qualify for reward or credit. Thanks for your help!

As much as I'm disappointed not to be getting a $10,000 bug bounty, I'm more upset that Google repeatedly finds itself failing to keep its users' private information private.

Update: according to a comment on the HackerNews discussion - problems like this have been reported to Google as far back as 2010.

Update 24 January: Google have agreed to fix this bug!

[W]e agree that the behavior you identified is undesirable, and we filed a bug with the Calendar team last week. They’ve been working on changing the behavior to make it clearer that someone has been added to the event in the situation you described.

While we won't be getting any of the monetary reward from the bug bounty, Google have graciously decided to include us in their Security Hall of Fame.

You can continue the discussion on The Verge, ars technica, Business Insider and Android Central.

Update 31 January: This flaw was discussed on the "This Week In Google" podcast.