I prefer to use Gmail as my primary email account for a variety of reasons. 
I have other email accounts, including one on a virtual machine run by a 
close family member.

Until a few years ago, I imported all mail via POP3. This stopped when 
Google decided that self-signed certificates were less secure than no 
encryption at all (how does this make sense?). At that time, Google 
employees advised users either to get an SSL certificate signed by a 
trusted CA, or have email forwarded from the external server.

So for the last few years, I've had my email forwarded from there with no 
problem. Then tonight I am told by my close family member that my emails 
will no longer be forwarded, because Gmail is rate-limiting *all* mail sent 
by that server, because some of the emails I get forwarded are spam. To 
make matters worse, Gmail is apparently doing this in at least one instance 
by *silently dropping messages while still indicating that the mail has 
been accepted*.

So as far as I can tell, Google's official policy is:

   1. Sending passwords in cleartext is better than trusting a certificate 
   signed by your close family member, because at least you *know* that 
   cleartext is insecure.
   2. If you want to not do that, then you must either convince the server 
   admin to buy an SSL certificate so that you can read your email more 
   conveniently, or
   3. Convince the server admin to forward all your email along, risking 
   their server's reputation and potentially interrupting normal use of their 
   service by other users

The obvious solution would just be to let me approve a particular 
self-signed certificate. I am not the first person to ask for this option. 
But in any case, following Google's advice to have email forwarded along 
should certainly not result in mail being silently dropped, let alone other 
people's mail...

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