Really frustrated by Google's inaction on fixing certain e-mail bugs for years

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PK

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:14:30 AM3/16/12
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I have a python application that uses mail for communication and notifications. In many occasions I have defended in this list how well mail has been working for me.

However, there are a few bugs that really bother some of my users and I have been expecting a fix for years. I am frustrated because they are relatively small things and I had the---obviously false---expectation that they would get fixed. Here are two at the top of my list:

Issue 2383   Filed on Nov 11 2009  8bit Mail encoding
Issue 3900  Filed on Oct 17 2010 
Incoming e-mail message with attachments in Unicode fails in _check_attachments()

If you do not fix these issues I cannot scale my enterprise and if we do not scale our enterprises how will you scale yours?

If you never plan to fix them, at least please let us know that mail is just a toy/prototype/experiment and not a professional platform so we can move elsewhere.

Thanks,
PK


Brandon Wirtz

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:23:22 AM3/16/12
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These aren’t so much bugs, as you don’t seem to be handling your string types.  You may have to do a check and convert formats, but both of these are a few lines of code to handle, 2383 there is even a code example posted.

 

I think your “false expectation” was that Google would loosen the Typing (and therefore the security) of their platform to accommodate your lack of coding experience.

 

 

 

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Jeff Schnitzer

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:38:26 AM3/16/12
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Mail is a service easily and well-supported by SES, MessageBus, and at
least a dozen others... not to mention "run your own". There is
nothing special about GAE's integrated mail api, and a lot of annoying
limitations (my personal annoyance - no way to embed images in an
email except with external hrefs). Just switch. This shouldn't take
you more than a few hours.

This is an important signaling mechanism. If people stop using the
service, Google may realize that the service is inadequate. Maybe
they'll shut it down and reallocate dev resources to something else,
or maybe they will improve the service. Either way is a win.

Sorry if this seems callous, but IMHO the "send email" api is a waste
of precious developer resources. There are a zillion other features
I'd rather see implemented. I really don't care who sends my email.
I'd kill for spatial queries.

Jeff

Brandon Wirtz

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:44:21 AM3/16/12
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>(my personal annoyance - no way to embed images in an email except with
external hrefs)

I haven't tried in a long while, but Data URI's seemed to work last time I
checked.. You have to build them yourself but doing the base64 encode is not
that hard.

PK

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Mar 16, 2012, 5:11:36 AM3/16/12
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Bradon,

I have not missed that you have a tendency to jump and reply on every thread. Many times your comments are useful are appreciated. Some times they are not. For instance, I did not find this reply that relies on "I think", "you dont seem" and "you may have to" to conclude that "I lack coding experience"----not even that "I may lack coding experience". Franky, I found it offending...

Both of these are acknowledged open issues. The first issue has been starred 40 times. If you honestly want to add value to GAE, please go to each bug and state why these are not issues and what the work around is. It is really not clear to me and many others. If you do not have the time, I fully understand and it is OK to stay silent, you do not have to reply to every message.

PK

Mos

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Mar 16, 2012, 5:21:43 AM3/16/12
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+1



PK

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pdknsk

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Mar 16, 2012, 5:27:54 AM3/16/12
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> Sorry if this seems callous, but IMHO the "send email" api is a waste
> of precious developer resources.

How many Googlers are currently working on it?

anatoly techtonik

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Mar 16, 2012, 6:12:35 AM3/16/12
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On Friday, March 16, 2012 11:14:30 AM UTC+3, PK wrote:

Issue 2383   Filed on Nov 11 2009  8bit Mail encoding


Let me point out the two important aspects of this (correct me if I wrong):

1. Emails in pretty valid 8bit encoding are silently ignored (users are not notified about errors)
2. This is marked as a Feature

Brandon Wirtz

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Mar 16, 2012, 11:42:18 AM3/16/12
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> If you honestly want to add value to GAE, please go to each bug and state why these are not issues and what the work around is.

 

I think it is unfortunate that GAE doesn’t close “By Design” more of these so people don’t feel they are being worked on when they aren’t.

 

Someone just mentioned that sometimes this API “Fails without error”. That is a bug.  If someone would open a ticket about “If you do X the API fails without error” I would bet money that in 90 days Google would fix the issue, either as “Now Fails with Error” or “Now Handles calls formatted as X”

Yeah, I’m harsh, and unfiltered.  You may not see that as helpful, but the truth is I told you why 2 years later the issue isn’t fixed. 

“Bugs” that don’t include “Code As follows gives result X when expected Result is Y” aren’t bugs, they are bad coders complaining that they can’t figure something out.  That annoys me far more than the people who got suckered in to MS that should be on HR. Mainly because the create an app page says MS is magical except when it is down. The Bug database is so filled with whining people that I don’t blame Google for not wanting to read it.

 

alex

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Mar 16, 2012, 11:50:51 AM3/16/12
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Totally agree with Brandon here on the bugs/issues reporting.

PK

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:46:52 PM3/16/12
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I really do not understand why Brandon insists on this one, he is really not helping us to raise the visibility of this with Google. What are these unsubstantiated theories that Google does not decode 8bit encoded MIME messages for security reasons.....

I have a really simple feature here---part of a much bigger service. It receives e-mails, decodes them, processes them, encodes them again and forwards them. Pretty cool!! For most e-mails it works and I have many happy users. For some encodings (like 8bit) it does not and raises an exception and for those users I cannot provide the service and then they go to my customer and compain. Like it or not there are e-mail clients out there to this day that generate e-mail message with such encodings. As I point in the bug, and the reason that triggered this message, I just found an e-mail like that yesterday night from a CS Professor at Stanford. I cannot control what e-mail clients my users use and I should not....

Thanks for reading,
PK

Joshua Smith

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Mar 16, 2012, 4:55:33 PM3/16/12
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I've been able to work around bugs in the past by looking at the source (it's in the SDK if you grep deep enough), finding the bug, fixing the bug, and then implementing my own functions in my application to do things the right way while I way for them to put the fix into the official version.

A nice benefit is that you can add the actual fix to the bug report, which makes it much quicker to get fixed.

If this is such a big deal to you, I'd recommend that you try that approach.

-Joshua

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Brandon Wirtz

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Mar 16, 2012, 7:24:41 PM3/16/12
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> What are these unsubstantiated theories that Google does not decode 8bit encoded MIME messages for security reasons.....

Strong Typing (and Encoding) are pretty core to python. Accepting all codings is actually not common in most functions. 

This may not seem like a security thing, but it is certainly a Testing overhead, and a potential outputs issue (plus all the dependencies then have to support the encoding as well.  There are a number of things that Python errors horribly if there is a non-standard or unexpected encoding on a character.  It’s a pain in the ass, but it is the way of the world.

 

 

PK

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Mar 16, 2012, 9:21:32 PM3/16/12
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Hi Joshua,

Thanks for contributing to the thread.

I have followed the approach you suggest in the past for some things and agree with you it is a good one. However, I do not have the time to do it in all areas and for every issue. I am in a very competitive space and need to be implementing new features to survive, whatever time was left lately was spent transitioning to HRD, new pricing, python27 and still dealing with the aftermath. The past 6 months have been tough....

If you look at the first issue, ways to be fixed have been suggested. This was the kind of thing, that three years ago I said: if Google has implemented 98% of the mail service in a few months, in a few more months they will have ironed all these other issues we reported and we will be good to go. Well, three years later I conclude that they have just abandoned it ASIS.

Anyways, I am more happy with GAE than upset and most time Google eventually has taken care of the issues especially when we have complained about issues and the time it takes to get resolved. So do me a favor and help me out by starring the issue and I am still confident that the Google will take care of it before I loose a customer because of it.

PK
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