Dan’s Space on the Web

Popup Plus only provides the popup service – to actually get notifications (eg. new message), need another plugin such as Message Notify.

trying a new setup by forwarding all my mail to my private gmail, thereby eliminating the need for thunderbird. Instead, to get email notifications, decided to grab the Gmail Notifier. Immediately I noticed one thing:

It only asks you if you want to enable auto-start at startup during installation – after that, there isn’t anywhere for you to change this.

Having recently moved hosting to Dreamhost, I moved enhancedseed.com’s email hosting to gmail as well. I usually have all my @enhancedseed.com email setup to forward all email to my private gmail address, so I did the same for the new hosting.

Interestingly, when I sent an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com to test the forwarding,  the email never made it to my private gmail’s inbox. Instead, it got immediately marked as read and archived.

To further figure out what’s going on, I sent another email to the same address, but from my school email account. As expected, this time it worked fine, arriving and sitting in my inbox like any other email until I opened it.

So what’s going on? Initially I thought that perhaps GMail was “smart” enough to see that the from: entry was myself. However this is not the case, because if I were to send an email to myself directly (not that I write emails to myself as a friend wrongly intepreted)  it was happily sit in the inbox, unread, until I open it. Then, I remembered what happened a few days ago when I had setup my Thunderbird with my gmail via IMAP, and had mapped the Drafts folder to gmail’s Draft “folder”.

What happened when I mapped the Draft folder accordingly was that I started seeing many emails being downloaded there, when I had no Drafts being stored in my account. Upon inspection, turns out these emails were drafts that were auto-saved while composing my emails in the gmail web-interface.

I concluded that since GMail does not use the folder structure but instead applies Labels, it probably “sends” these saved drafts to my account, immediately archives them and labels them “Draft”. How it knew that it was an “incoming” draft was by looking at where it came from: myself, which brings us back to the start of this article.

By sending an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com and then having it automatically forward all mail back to the same account, I suspect that GMail saw the forwarded mail as coming from me and treats it similarly as a draft.

However, why didn’t it label the email as “Draft”? Perhaps when “sending” the draft emails it has some header information that my forwarded emails as lacking, and so the labelling part isn’t triggered.

I also realize that this method of sending yourself draft emails to store them is pretty silly, so it’s probably some hand-waving magic going on internally within the server that doesn’t quite literally do what I say it does.  Of course, I don’t have information on what exactly happens with drafts, so it’s hard for me to figure out exactly what’s going on with my case. I will have to think about this a bit more and maybe carry out a few more tests…

Update: I noticed that chat logs are stored as read mail as well. Also thought about Sent mail – are those just being labeled as well? Also, the behavior in question was replicated by sending an email to a googlegroup I am registered for but under a different email that forwards back to the account I sent the email from (email.A -> group -> email.B -> email.A).

edit: wait, the googlegroup repro was probably due to a filter I created for emails sent to the googlegroup (the filter is meant to catch emails sent to the group email).  On the other hand, the filter isn’t supposed to automatically mark it as read.