About Apple deleting Gmail messages | Hacker News Reader

About Apple deleting Gmail messages

scripting.com

42 pointsrandomname220 comments

Sounds like a rather awful bug on Apples side, or at least a gap in their reasoning about logins to third-party services.

I'm not sure why the OP reaches for the tin-foil hat towards the end. If the gmail messages that are being deleted are actual (or borderline) spam, and don't reflect a systemic targeting of messages originating from google, then it seems a bit crazy to claim there's a conspiracy going on.

I would hazard to guess that OP did enter his gmail info and just forgot about it. I have a macbook air and an iphone. My macbook air has never received credentials from the iphone for my gmail...

Then you probably have the iCloud Keychain service disabled, because iOS and OS X do sync the Internet Account settings.

What is iCloud Keychain?

iCloud Keychain keeps your Safari website usernames and passwords, credit card information, and Wi-Fi network information up to date across all of your approved devices that are using iOS 7.0.3 or later or OS X Mavericks v10.9 or later.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204085

That sounds like a security gaffe just waiting to happen - credit card information automatically synced everywhere.

Oh wait, didn't this already happen to some guy who got locked out of all his devices with via iCloud?

Now you can automatically lose all your emails, max all your credit cards, and send all your porn files to your grandmother.

Progress!

I am the OP.

In some cases the messages they've deleted have been important real emails. Not spam.

Also you're being a little dramatic in characterizing my comments. You might want to temper that, esp when you're accusing someone else of doing what you are yourself doing. ;-)

>> Also you're being a little dramatic in characterizing my comments. You might want to temper that, esp when you're accusing someone else of doing what you are yourself doing. ;-)

Fair enough :)

I didn't mean to cause offense, but to be fair the following passage:

>>>> Could it possibly be that Apple doesn't like the fact that I use GMail? Could this be marketing? A feature, not a bug?

... reads as quite paranoid. Without strong evidence of a conspiracy I'd be inclined to believe this is not a deliberate and malicious act by Apple against the user, but simply low-quality software engineering.

Also, thanks for the links to the TSR Wars, that was some good reading!

And when it comes to security, paranoid is the right approach.

As for how it "reads" to you -- that has more to do with you than me. ;-)

Quite true, on both counts :)

That's why 'you' statements suck and should be avoided, if possible, by both parties.

I am putting my money on the author clicking through the popup on OS X after you login to Gmail.com offering to keep the credentials and use them within the OS. I'll try to find a copy of this screen. IIRC it is clearly different from just Safari saving passwords but it's highly likely that people will click through it.

Edit: here is the screen I am referring to: http://photos2.appleinsidercdn.com/MLSafari2.030512.png

Wait, so Safari recognizes when you log into Gmail and vaguely offers to let you use Apple Mail instead, which has a history of not working well with Gmail's label and archive system? That's kind of fucked up.

It does indeed. And aside from a few less-than-sane defaults I haven't had any issues with Mail and our Google Apps account at work (though I don't add accounts this way).

I am the OP -- never happened here. I don't use Safari for email, btw.

This is disturbing behaviour on the part of Apple, and I concur that there are serious issues with how intrusive both iOS and OSX are when it comes to accessing accounts and sharing details from one host to another - it seems like Apple are trying to excel at doing their customers a favor by passing these credentials between machines, but it creates more of a headache - and potential security risk - than it should.

I long for the days when sensible principles governed the implementation of these kinds of features - as it stands, as an Apple customer, I have no idea how far and wide my keychain has been dispersed around the Apple universe. Very disturbing indeed.

OT, but if the OP doesn't like getting notifications on stuff on the Apple Watch, he/she can go into the Apple Watch app on the iPhone and turn off any that get annoying. Turning off email notifications was the first to happen for me :) .

Heck, what I am posting is unrelated to the specific thread but every time I enter scripting.com and read some Dave Winer post I remember why I miss Userland Frontier. Wonderful piece of tech, my first exposure to RSS and XML-RPC and a wonderful world of interoperability which we basically lost now with mobile being ruled by proprietary silos and secret APIs.

My Mac is only connected to Gmail to sync contacts, but when I authenticate with Google, mail is in the list of permissions. Now I'm worried this could happen to me, even though I don't have mail checked.

Here's another disturbing story about Apple's attitude about security, from 2007.

http://scripting.com/stories/2007/12/22/macsAreEvenMoreExpen...

Any one else seeing Chrome increasingly become more unstable on iOS?

Yes. I've written a lot about it on my blog.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ascripting.com+google+...

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