Tag: google

Moving cPanel email to Gmail

There should be a collective gasp here.

It’s no big secret I dislike Google. I don’t trust them at all. I think Cory Doctorow’s story Scroogled is pretty much on the ball. But I also have been struggling with handling my server’s email and spam situations and if there’s one thing Google has turned out to be pretty good at, it’s spam. Also having my email separate from my hosting means if the site goes down, I’ll still get emails… Which is sort of important.

So I bit the bullet, sorted out I needed to pay for three emails (making it $15 a month) and a boat load of secondary domains and filters. Since I’d dropped the cost of my hosting by $20 a month, this worked out alright.

The Setup

This part is the easy one. Go to https://apps.google.com and put in your information. If, like me, you have multiple domains, pick one to be your ‘master’ domain. I chose ipstenu.org because that’s my main domain in Multisite and there’s some parity going on here. Since this is geared to businesses, you do need to give your business a name. Sorry.

Next you’ll pick your users. Like I said, I have three: Me, my wife, and my admin account. Why does admin need it’s own account? It doesn’t. But it might. For now I had them email me at my personal gmail (I can always resend later) since I don’t want them to be alerted to things just yet as I planned to import all their old email.

Finally it does the “Verify your domain and set up email” step. Which failed. And took 50 minutes. Unfunny. Originally I did the TXT domain setup, and when that failed I did CNAME. Longest ‘about 50 minutes’ ever. And that failed too. Finally I did the damned ‘file verification’ which was ridiculous and stupid but that worked and it still took another 50 minutes to set up my emails.

Eventually, after talking to Google, my web host, and my domain registrar, it turned out there was a glitch in my domain servers… There was no A record for my nameservers. Thank you Carol, Samuel, and Tatyana for helping that one.

Migrating Data

I mentioned I have three accounts. They have around 30 megs of email each. But I also have secondary accounts which are basically the same accounts only not… And to be honest I don’t know why I have so many. This was a chance to combine everything, so I set up those three accounts and then I used the IMAP importer to pull in everything. And it worked. That simple.

Configuring Accounts

Now that I have three accounts, I needed to add in my ‘other’ emails. I have a lot of weird aliases. I used to have separate accounts for each email but … well that’s a pain in the ass. So instead of that, I set up folders. I made a folder for each domain alias and then set up redirects. If email was sent to the halfelf.org domain, then it went to a folder called ‘HalfElf.’ Originally I had a whole mess of weird redirects going on, like if it was from WP then it went to a WordPress folder and so on, but unraveling that and going simple seemed like a wise choice.

I went into the cPanel backups page and downloaded all my forwarder information as well and set up email forwards! Well. Not forwards. Aliases. Same idea really. And it was nice, since I added all my domains as aliases, ipstenu@[anydomain] would now work! I set up a lot of filters to keep things out of my inbox and in their proper, attention needing, spots.

Blocking Users

Finally it was time for my soon to be favorite step. Blocking users. Blocking senders for every domain is possible in Gmail and in my opinion, it’s huge. I have a list of 66 emails that I block on all my servers. This is for myriad reasons, but primarily is these are people who don’t know how the shut the hell up and leave me alone. Since I’m under no obligation to talk to these people, I blocked them.

Exporting that list from cPanel was un-fun. You can either manually copy it out, line by line, or you can find the filter rules. They are, sadly, stored in the /etc/vfilters directory, so you need root access (which I have), but it’s not easy to get at. BUT! As of the latest version of cPanel, if you go into backups you can export your filters. They’re in a YAML format, but that’s easier than copy/pasta.

Cleaning up cPanel

So now that everything is on gmail, do I even need to run email on the server? Yes. I have to be able to send email. I did go through and delete all the accounts, though, freeing up a bit of space, and I turned off Greylisting (I know, I just did that!), and I hid the ability to add new accounts.

30 September, 2016
Google Advertising Experiments

In the time since I’ve gone back to Google Adsense, I’ve had issues with some of their ads. Mostly religion and politics. Big shocker, right? Every once in a while, Google suggest I allow those ads:

Consider allowing ads from sensitive categories to increase auction pressure and improve performance.

I usually discard the suggestion, but this time they tried something new to me.

… you can allow these ads now, or run an experiment to help you decide.

Experiment?

There are only two types of experiments right now. One is ad units, where you can adjust templates and ad sizes. The other is what I’m doing, allowing and blocking ads. I clicked on the experiment button, and it set up an A/B test for me, tracking the clicks of each version of my site, to see if anyone actually clicks on those ads.

Initially there was an option to automatically pick the best one, but I don’t know if I want to. I do know that I want to actually see if anyone who reads my sites wants to see political ads.

The reason I’d blocked them is they were showing right-wing crazy people on my sites, and I’m not that person. They were showing ads I would deem offensive (and you have to work hard to offend me) so instead of reading every single ad, I decided to block all of them, assuming I wasn’t hurting my income too much.

After this experiment, I’ll circle back and make a more informed decision. I wish there were more things I could experiment on, like specific ads in specific locations, but this ability to just see if the ads are clicked at all is a nice start for a free product.

15 June, 2016
De-fontification

I love fonts. They’re a great way to make your site unique. Back in the early 2010s, we were all using them all over the place.

It’s time to retire them. (more…)

16 May, 2016
Rant: Gmail Contacts

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to have a good ol’ rant in on tech!

I use Gmail in the browser, like my friend James. It’s meant to be used there. I’ll use it there. But I often get emailed new contact information, and I want to add it to Google Contacts. Here’s the workflow.

I open the email and click on the ‘add contact’ button.

There’s often no response at this point. The page sits there and I don’t see anything telling me to go to another page. Eventually the browser takes me to a new page in the same screen where I now have a new contact group with the name “Imported DATE” and one user (or possibly two if I clicked, saw no response, and clicked again):

At this point, I have to click the find and merge to get them back down to one. Then I click what groups I want the new user to be in. Of note, you must press the “Apply” button:

No ajax here.

But what about that group?

Now some of this I can do from the list user screen, but I still have to go to contacts, mess with it, and then delete the temp group. No ajax. No way to add just from within mail. No way to open in a new window.

It’s just crap.

10 July, 2015
Mailbag: One Analytics to Bind Them
Mailbag on Monday because Angie Meeker asks:

Do you have an article about getting Google Analytics right on Multisite, so SA can see indiv stats for each site, but also parent. Where the SAdmin owns the entire GA account (site owners don’t need their own GA account)

There are a few ways to do this, and they’re all pretty easy.

Google Mod_PageSpeed

This is the ‘easiest’ way if you already have PageSpeed installed. You can put in your GA filter in the .htaccess and be done with it:
```
ModPagespeedEnableFilters insert_ga
ModPagespeedAnalyticsID <Analytics ID>
```
That’s actually what I do here, because I’m incredibly lazy and I have Pagespeed set up on my server. I can even make this a little more special by using if statements in Apache 2.4:
```
<If "$req{Host} == 'www.domain.com'">
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters insert_ga
    ModPagespeedAnalyticsID <Analytics ID>
</If>
```
MU Plugin

But if you’re still on Apache 2.2 or don’t want to mess with .htaccess for whatever reason, then you should try an mu-plugin, my favorite things in the world. And all you have to do is this:

// Paste your Google Analytics code here
18 August, 2014
HSTS and Chromium
I use Chromium, which is like the super most beta beta of Chrome, for one reason: It lets me run Chrome ‘twice’ in separate environments. I have a reason for it, but it doesn’t matter for the purpose of this post. Neither does the reason why I was editing a subdomain I rarely use. What matters is this.

I went to http://test.ipstenu.org and I got this:

My bp must have dropped because my first thought was “Oh shit, I’ve been hacked!” and I got the cold sweats. After a rant on Twitter and a plea for test help, I determined this was only happening on Chromium, which was interested, and my friend Benny pointed me to this Chromium Issue: Issue 350912: Chrome fetches https URL even when http URL explicitly specified which sure sounded right.

Now the rest of the error was telling me that test.ipstenu.org was asking I use HTTPS (which it was not) and that the SSL Cert didn’t match that domain (which was correct, but again, there is no SSL cert for that subdomain). Weird, right? Why would it force https when I didn’t ask it to! But what if I was? As I read through the ticket, I saw that you could see the headers better at chrome://net-internals/#hsts so I ran that and got this:
```
mode: STRICT sts_include_subdomains:true pkp_include_subdomains:false sts_observed:1402609861.497659 pkp_observed:1402608721.515596 domain:test.ipstenu.org pubkey_hashes: [...]
```
That was odd. I knew I’d set this in my .htaccess file:
```
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains"
```
But from what I’d read that was getting set only if you accessed the site via HTTPS (or anything on the page was HTTPS). After all, no other browser was acting like this, not even Beta Chrome. Still I turned it off, flushed my server cache, flushed my browser cache, and deleted the TransportSecurity files from Chrome. Now it worked. Turned it back on? Error came back.

It was here I realized “Chromium has decided that if you set HSTS, you mean that everything should be HTTPS regardless of the domain…” Well that’s just peachy! I pulled the HSTS line from .htaccess and instead tossed it into a PHP file for the subdomain(s) where I needed it:
```
header("Strict-Transport-Security:max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains");
```
Now. There are two situations particular to me that make this an epic pain in the ass:

First, I’m using WordPress multisite and I have SSL turned on for one domain. Second, I’m using WMH, which means editing my vhosts file to make this work properly is more of a hassle than it’s worth.

Really wouldn’t it make more sense to check “Is this an HTTPS page? No? Okay, skip!” But this is a (to me) departure from the logic train. As my friend James (and I) understood, the logic of HSTS was “If any aspect of the page is HTTPS, force HTTPS” Instead of that happening, if you went to, say, ‘fake.ipstenu.org’ instead of going to my about page (yes, that’s on purpose), it gave me the error. If you go to ‘https://fake.ipstenu.org’ you should get a specific warning page and then a ‘shucky darn!’ page. And yet here I saw that no matter if I picked HTTPS or HTTP, I was forced to HTTPS and that’s just silly.

Does my fix work? Of course. Am I happy? Nope! Oh, and yes, I filed a bug report with Chromium. You can read it at Issue 384069: HSTS in .htaccess forces https even when not specified
13 June, 2014