Silly bug in Gmail

Not long ago I wrote about how much I love GMail and about a particular feature that I like. Well, today's post is about a bug in GMail which just feels outright silly.

GMail has this feature that you can use it to handle other email accounts. It goes like this: you set your other email account to forward it to your GMail address. Then you can tell GMail that you want to be able to send emails using that email account. In order not to enable fraud or any wrongful impersonation GMail sends out a confirmation email to the address you want to use and if it comes back properly then you can click on a link which enables you to use the other email address when sending emails from GMail. Pretty straightforward.

The other day I was going to add another email address to my GMail account just as I described above. This is where I bumped into the bug. When GMail sent out a confirmation email it didn't come back. I thought that was odd and sent another one. It too seemed to disappear somewhere on the internet. Since this address wasn't very important to me I just left it alone and went to work on other stuff.

The surprise came when I opened the spam box to weed out the false positives (something which I get at least once a week). Lo and behold, there were the two confirmation emails sent out by GMail before.

Excuse me but this just seems silly? Sure I can see that the email has to go through the spam filter. But there are many good techniques for creating a little back door in the filter such that you can make sure the confirmation emails always goes through. This just shouldn't happen.

Well, I've reported it to the Gmail team. I hope they get around to fixing it soon.