I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from.
At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness. Even in this discussion: how many people use Gmail as their primary email service?
alpaca128 14 minutes ago [-]
On YouTube I reported bot accounts for a couple days, the only reaction I got was that at some point it showed a popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban. Not sure what Google gets out of it, but there is no way they could be that bad at fighting bots unless they're not even trying. Even trivial tricks like copy-pasted texts keep working.
n3storm 1 hours ago [-]
I have been observing this for the last 2-3 years (4 postfix servers sysadmin)
Gmail cannot be whitelisted anymore: spam, phishing,...
On the other hand, if your users redirect twitter or linkedin notifications from their domain to a gmail account, Google claims you are sending too fast and is suspicious (and throttles or blocks ip).
Hilarious.
urban_winter 4 hours ago [-]
Google suspend email accounts that get lots of spam reports. It happens a couple of times a year for salespeople in my company who use Gmass (a bulk email sending tool).
I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.
smolder 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't say that's robust email monitoring at all. It's embarassingly bad. Gmass shouldn't exist and your salespeople should be out of a job.
rwmj 2 hours ago [-]
I guess you can only report spam through the gmail web interface which the FSF aren't using (because they're not using gmail, for obvious ideological reasons).
cpncrunch 3 hours ago [-]
So, just to clarify, the salespeople are spamming cold addresses, or are they opted in or existing customers?
bdavbdav 2 hours ago [-]
Was going to say there’s a good reason lots of people use services like mailchimp now. You’re not sensibly managing it yourself with the current (very sensible) regulations in the US / EU, nor do you want to be sending from your own domain en masse.
cpncrunch 2 hours ago [-]
Mailchimp and other legitimate services (other than salesforce, which is best just blocked) don't permit spam, whereas gmail and outlook don't give a fuck unless the spammer gets a large amount of abuse reports.
Certainly mailchimp and the like make things simpler, but the price can be quite high.
jstanley 1 hours ago [-]
This seems to be a laughable claim? I don't get anything but spam from Mailchimp.
TeMPOraL 15 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, Mailchimp is a tool specifically built and advertised to send spam.
cpncrunch 8 minutes ago [-]
Where does it say on their website that it is specifically for sending spam?
cpncrunch 59 minutes ago [-]
No, it's valid for me, and I just verified. In spam filter for past month: 0 mailchimp. In valid emails: 6 emails from a service that I signed up for via mailchimp.
Checking my received emails for mailchimp I see a whole bunch of legitimate emails, including for flightschedulepro which uses it. I also see replies to my abuse reports to mailchimp saying the problems have been addressed.
Do you report any of these spams to mailchimp?
noobermin 14 minutes ago [-]
I hope you realise, it does sound like you are suggesting that salespeople in your company are essentially spammers.
p4bl0 2 hours ago [-]
> Google have robust email abuse monitoring
But only in Gmail then? Where is it possible to report a spam from a Gmail address received on a non-Gmail inbox?
Google is being a real PITA as the receiving side for people who try to self-host their mail or who use small providers. They should at least be good citizen on the sending side, which it seems they're not. They are killing email.
weird-eye-issue 1 hours ago [-]
Spam reporting is pretty standardized? If your email client doesn't support it that's not Google's fault.
edit: I might be incorrect on this and was thinking about how unsubscribing is standardized instead.
holowoodman 1 hours ago [-]
Standardized how?
Basically, there is no standard beyond the ages-old requirement to have abuse@ and postmaster@ email addresses that react to such reports. Which Google doesn't follow at all, you just get redirected to some useless web form which requires a Google account and the sacrifice of a goat.
It is entirely Google's fault, and they should be shunned for it and their emails dropped. But unfortunately, they are too big for that by far...
n3storm 59 minutes ago [-]
Maybe is thing about Gmail about "This message is spam", that is a Gmail feature not anything standard.
Same as Gmail broke IMAP standard, or Gtalk XMPP standard.
Google can do whatever they please, they've become the standard of humanity surveillance.
jamespo 1 hours ago [-]
Marking a mail as spam locally is different from spam reporting
Fokamul 27 minutes ago [-]
I think in this case and all the others.
They're not sending emails directly from their gmail address.
But they are adding victim emails to other Google services and then Google themselves send them invitations emails.
And if you name your service like "Google helpdesk - password reset" or something like that.
Invitation email from Google will look very official, but URL in the email will be controlled by the attacker.
It's pretty old working technique used for phishing for years now.
Spam report does nothing, since you're reporting official Google email.
vachina 10 minutes ago [-]
someone hooked up their web app to Google Workspace email and the web app got pwned.
Google Workspace email is very generous with the kind of outgoing email you can send via their SMTP servers.
monegator 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, the only thing that would work is to hire a bot service that would report the offending account en masse.
cpncrunch 2 hours ago [-]
gmail, outlook and salesforce create about 90% of the spam that gets through blacklists. Salesforce is simple to fix: I just block anything from salesforce from our network, as it just seems to be 100% used by spammers. Gmail and outlook are the major problem, as there is no way of addressing their spam issue.
nwellnhof 50 minutes ago [-]
In my experience, everyone got their act together except Google. I also used to receive massive amounts of spam from Azure and Sendgrid but this eventually stopped. Now 80% of the spam I receive is from the Google network, mainly Google Cloud.
throwaway290 36 minutes ago [-]
> In my experience, everyone got their act together except Google.
I remember a bunch of spam and fishing emails from weird Outlook addresses. Don't remember any from Google.
walletdrainer 46 minutes ago [-]
Why do you interpret that as everyone except Google getting their act together?
The obvious (and correct) explanation is deliverability. Spammers send from Google services because they can inbox, they don’t send from other services because those services will not inbox successfully.
cpncrunch 42 minutes ago [-]
For me outlook is just as bad as google in terms of the spam that gets through my spam filters, as neither of them care much about abuse reports.
Washuu 2 hours ago [-]
Add Mailchimp in there as well. I have never gotten an email from someone using Mailchimp that was not spam.
cpncrunch 2 hours ago [-]
Although they does have proper abuse policies and do take action against spammers. I don't get any spam from them (except perhaps the very occasional one), and I know businesses that use mailchimp and similar services for valid marketing (to previous customers). Just looking through my received mailbox, I see many legitimate emails from mailchimp.
I'm not denying that they are sometimes used by spammers, but they are definitely a legitimate operation that takes action against spammers if you report them.
Havoc 28 minutes ago [-]
Crazy that you can even send that sort of volume from a gmail acc
throwawaysoxjje 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this has to do with the massive number of google calendar invites I’ve been getting as payment/billing notifications lately.
I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone getting hit with (Google) AppSheet-originating recruitment emails? Very well done. Imitating the biggest US brands.
Have reported AppSheet to FCC after seeing Google wasn't doing enough--same scam email format, same inbox-landing pathway, but still irked.
Also try forwarding the emails to the phishing emails of the misrepresented brands, when they have an address for it. Figure they're the ones who have any power.
KomoD 2 hours ago [-]
I thought they fixed that spam method a while ago
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen that ooe lately. I currently get lots of Nortoon Lifelock invoices with hundreds of addresses in the to field.
I always report them with suggestions they teach their AI that invoices sent to large number of addresses are phishing.
anonymousiam 50 minutes ago [-]
Lately I've been using SpamCop.net to make spam reports. It seems to work, and it's free. You are encouraged to donate, and they don't ask for much.
It's not perfect though. For some reason, it doesn't find (or deliberately ignores) OVH hosts that are relaying spam.
noobermin 5 hours ago [-]
It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only provider and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.
subroutine 5 hours ago [-]
Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Increasingly of the opinion that "free service with no support that's structurally essential for an economy" is some kind of trap. Possibly just the most comfortable kind of trap, a local optimum from which it's difficult to escape.
This is starting to become important as countries (very unwisely!) start tying things like national ID and banking to smartphones.
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it's that simple. As a litmus test, try to set up your own mail server. See how many milliseconds it takes for it to be blacklisted by gmail. And then observe the response time for their support, when you try to clear up the confusion that google has about your intentions.
Arnt 3 hours ago [-]
I run my own mail server, not blacklisted. Now I'm a bit of a special case, I know mail well.
But when a moderately technical colleague wanted to do the same, I told her to use Mox, she set it up and Gmail doesn't block her either.
So... would you please elaborate?
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
I've built mail servers before Gmail existed that lasted long enough to get blacklisted by Gmail.
Fixing it was always pretty simple -- or at least, non-mysterious. They'd bounce some things, I'd look at the headers of the bounced messages, and therein were links to instructions there that showed how to resolve whatever issue it was this year.
Just follow the steps, implement the new thing, and stuff started flowing again in rather short order. Not so bad.
IIRC, the only time it ever cost us any money was when the RBLs started keeping track of dynamic IP pools and we needed to finally shift over to something actually-static.
4 hours ago [-]
bigfatkitten 4 hours ago [-]
Google’s support for paying customers isn’t much better unless you’re spending well into the millions per year.
AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.
oivey 4 hours ago [-]
It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.
robot-wrangler 4 hours ago [-]
> How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. those constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota are still villainous
BLKNSLVR 3 hours ago [-]
If it didn't provide value it wouldn't exist.
Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.
It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).
sambuccid 3 hours ago [-]
We might not be paying money, but we don't know what happens to our private data.
Maybe it's not used at all, maybe used just internally, maybe could be even sold.
Data of millions of users is very very valuable, even just thinking about how much targeted adverts could be placed with it.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't sold directly. There are robust internal controls so random employees can't just snoop on eg ex girlfriends' email or be fired.
Source: Used to work there.
grey-area 3 hours ago [-]
Gmail shows ads to make money so it is not loss making.
Google Workspace charges money per user (and still offers abysmal support).
unmole 5 hours ago [-]
> get money for free
How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
noobermin 5 hours ago [-]
A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.
unmole 4 hours ago [-]
Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
> For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address.
> In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
diath 45 minutes ago [-]
This is anecdotal but here's the breakdown of top 10 e-mail providers from my database, does not look like a monopoly:
MariaDB > SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(email, '@', -1) AS domain, COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM accounts GROUP BY domain HAVING domain != '' ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 10;
+-------------+-------+
| domain | cnt |
+-------------+-------+
| hotmail.com | 38015 |
| gmail.com | 16280 |
| yahoo.com | 4080 |
| o2.pl | 2321 |
| wp.pl | 2206 |
| live.com | 1415 |
| outlook.com | 814 |
| interia.pl | 609 |
| hotmail.es | 590 |
| live.se | 521 |
+-------------+-------+
10 rows in set (0.044 sec)
unmole 2 hours ago [-]
Most people use Gmail because they want to, not because they have to. It's a free, superior product. Pretending voluntary preference is a monopoly is nonsense, but it is a very Mastodon-brained take.
noobermin 4 hours ago [-]
It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
ranger_danger 4 hours ago [-]
> You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
unmole 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
eesmith 19 minutes ago [-]
There is a common misapprehension that the term "monopoly" can only be used when there a single supplier.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
In the name of national security, of course.
themafia 4 hours ago [-]
Try running your own SMTP server for a while. Gmail holds what appears to be monopoly power and uses it quite readily. Even ISPs with "free" customer email addresses aren't nearly as onerous as google is.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
mindslight 4 hours ago [-]
Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
But theres not even that going on.
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
xeyownt 24 minutes ago [-]
You are missing the point.
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
4 hours ago [-]
bmandale 4 hours ago [-]
>How do they get money for free?
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above
unmole 4 hours ago [-]
Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?
darkwater 4 hours ago [-]
No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.
unmole 4 hours ago [-]
So, Google built a superior product that is profitable and we are supposed to be mad about this?
ranger_danger 5 hours ago [-]
Advertising and eyeballs, I'd assume
TheChaplain 5 hours ago [-]
It seems weird that Google wouldn't have some kind of observability alert on outgoing email. 10k emails per week is a lot.
superfrank 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it actually is. Free Gmail is limited to 500 emails a day, but Workspace accounts are allowed up to 2000, so this this spammer has to be using a Workspace account.
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
compounding_it 4 hours ago [-]
What if someone (Google) used Google suite to send 10k emails to fire people. Wouldn’t that be considered normal for the server for a day let alone a week. Yes I know I could have come up with a better example.
blitzar 4 hours ago [-]
ye olde corporate reply to all bomb .. no more emails this week everyone, we have used up our quota
gambiting 4 hours ago [-]
Those would be internal so I'm not sure they'd even count against your quota.
compounding_it 4 hours ago [-]
The example was given to say you could be a gsuite customer and have 10k emails a week be very normal. Something that wouldn’t trigger any alarms unless set. The alarms would probably be set on a curve. Something unusual would be far off the curve.
likis 3 hours ago [-]
10k outgoing emails per week it NOT a lot.
Just imagine a weekly newsletter with 100k subscribers.
marcyb5st 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, you are using the wrong tool if you send your newsletter from a gmail account at that scale. You can get away with a few tens of people, perhaps a few hundreds.
Above that threshold you should use tools like moosend, benchmarkemail, or similar. And they ask a pretty penny when you reach that scale.
pembrook 3 hours ago [-]
You can’t send bulk newsletters from gmail/outlook.
xp84 3 hours ago [-]
Well, you can't directly, but you can use SMTP, which you can plug into any garden-variety spamming tool as long as it supports that.
thayne 3 hours ago [-]
It may not be a single email, they might be using many throwaway accounts.
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
Google removed humans, so ... anyone able to contact real people at Google?
tjpnz 5 hours ago [-]
Spammer must be a whale spending untold amounts on other Google services.
TabTwo 3 hours ago [-]
Had Google trying to send me mails to non-existing mail-addresses over months. You would think their logs might catch something like that or they would react to my complaints ... they don't and they just dont care.
It sometimes stops for weeks, then it continiues.
from my logs as an example:
Nov 13 22:10:51 bert postfix/smtpd[2693931]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-oi1-x248.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-oi1-x248.google.com>
Nov 13 22:12:07 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-ua1-x948.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::948]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer1000@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-ua1-x948.google.com>
Nov 13 22:12:18 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x346.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::346]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x346.google.com>
Nov 13 22:12:37 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lf1-x146.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::146]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer333@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lf1-x146.google.com>
Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com>
Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x345.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::345]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayerrmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x345.google.com>
Nov 13 22:14:03 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayera@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com>
As you can see, the to-address is generated and its different hosts at google trying to send mails.
Searching for zf.thesparklebar.com shows others having the same problem.
rmu09 1 hours ago [-]
Not an expert, but AFAIK 450 is a non-permanent error that basically says "try again later".
SilverElfin 6 hours ago [-]
Good luck. These big tech companies have no incentive to care about support or really anything that isn’t tied directly to making money. And unless you have a friend there, Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.
jwr 37 minutes ago [-]
> Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.
I don't think people appreciate that this is really the key observation here. In large institutions, for anything significant to happen, there have to be incentives and alternatives, and these are set by management. Management in turn usually cares about their incentives, and the company overall mostly cares about the bottom line and the financial reports.
As a result, this is unlikely to get addressed, unless there is significant pressure, like media coverage, people mass-resigning from Gmail, or major email servers blocking Google. But none of these are likely to happen.
ranger_danger 5 hours ago [-]
I think there are lots of people that will see this story that either work at google or know someone who does, and I bet it will lead to their issue getting fixed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
It would help if they provided literally any way for a squeaky wheel to squeak at them aside from squeaking at the employees with a modicum of dignity (if they still exist)
snickerbockers 4 hours ago [-]
Based on how much zendesk spam there is i doubt it.
rockskon 5 hours ago [-]
Cynicism helps no one.
hani1808 52 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
hani1808 56 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
throwuxiytayq 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should try getting a paid Google Workspace subscription /s
thayne 3 hours ago [-]
Having a workspace subscription still doesn't get you a human to talk to.
connorgurney 3 hours ago [-]
It most certainly does in the UK.
tjpnz 5 hours ago [-]
This is a plausible explanation based on the amount of fraud tolerated in other parts of their business. But it's probably going to cost you more than one Workspace subscription.
hgaddipa001 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 10:15:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from.
At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness. Even in this discussion: how many people use Gmail as their primary email service?
Gmail cannot be whitelisted anymore: spam, phishing,... On the other hand, if your users redirect twitter or linkedin notifications from their domain to a gmail account, Google claims you are sending too fast and is suspicious (and throttles or blocks ip).
Hilarious.
I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.
Certainly mailchimp and the like make things simpler, but the price can be quite high.
Checking my received emails for mailchimp I see a whole bunch of legitimate emails, including for flightschedulepro which uses it. I also see replies to my abuse reports to mailchimp saying the problems have been addressed.
Do you report any of these spams to mailchimp?
But only in Gmail then? Where is it possible to report a spam from a Gmail address received on a non-Gmail inbox?
Google is being a real PITA as the receiving side for people who try to self-host their mail or who use small providers. They should at least be good citizen on the sending side, which it seems they're not. They are killing email.
edit: I might be incorrect on this and was thinking about how unsubscribing is standardized instead.
Basically, there is no standard beyond the ages-old requirement to have abuse@ and postmaster@ email addresses that react to such reports. Which Google doesn't follow at all, you just get redirected to some useless web form which requires a Google account and the sacrifice of a goat.
It is entirely Google's fault, and they should be shunned for it and their emails dropped. But unfortunately, they are too big for that by far...
Same as Gmail broke IMAP standard, or Gtalk XMPP standard.
Google can do whatever they please, they've become the standard of humanity surveillance.
They're not sending emails directly from their gmail address.
But they are adding victim emails to other Google services and then Google themselves send them invitations emails.
And if you name your service like "Google helpdesk - password reset" or something like that.
Invitation email from Google will look very official, but URL in the email will be controlled by the attacker.
It's pretty old working technique used for phishing for years now.
Spam report does nothing, since you're reporting official Google email.
Google Workspace email is very generous with the kind of outgoing email you can send via their SMTP servers.
I remember a bunch of spam and fishing emails from weird Outlook addresses. Don't remember any from Google.
The obvious (and correct) explanation is deliverability. Spammers send from Google services because they can inbox, they don’t send from other services because those services will not inbox successfully.
I'm not denying that they are sometimes used by spammers, but they are definitely a legitimate operation that takes action against spammers if you report them.
I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them
Have reported AppSheet to FCC after seeing Google wasn't doing enough--same scam email format, same inbox-landing pathway, but still irked.
Also try forwarding the emails to the phishing emails of the misrepresented brands, when they have an address for it. Figure they're the ones who have any power.
I always report them with suggestions they teach their AI that invoices sent to large number of addresses are phishing.
It's not perfect though. For some reason, it doesn't find (or deliberately ignores) OVH hosts that are relaying spam.
This is starting to become important as countries (very unwisely!) start tying things like national ID and banking to smartphones.
But when a moderately technical colleague wanted to do the same, I told her to use Mox, she set it up and Gmail doesn't block her either.
So... would you please elaborate?
Fixing it was always pretty simple -- or at least, non-mysterious. They'd bounce some things, I'd look at the headers of the bounced messages, and therein were links to instructions there that showed how to resolve whatever issue it was this year.
Just follow the steps, implement the new thing, and stuff started flowing again in rather short order. Not so bad.
IIRC, the only time it ever cost us any money was when the RBLs started keeping track of dynamic IP pools and we needed to finally shift over to something actually-static.
AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. those constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota are still villainous
Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.
It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).
Source: Used to work there.
How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491
> For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address.
> In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
One well-known rejection of the Borkian view is in Lina Khan "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" paper. https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
(I can't find a copy of that source online, but you can see the quote at https://archive.org/details/traderegulationc0005pito/mode/2u... where Pitofsky rejects viewing antitrust law through an exclusively economic lens.)
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
In the name of national security, of course.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
Just imagine a weekly newsletter with 100k subscribers.
Above that threshold you should use tools like moosend, benchmarkemail, or similar. And they ask a pretty penny when you reach that scale.
It sometimes stops for weeks, then it continiues.
from my logs as an example: Nov 13 22:10:51 bert postfix/smtpd[2693931]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-oi1-x248.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-oi1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:07 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-ua1-x948.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::948]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer1000@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-ua1-x948.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:18 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x346.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::346]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x346.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:37 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lf1-x146.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::146]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer333@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lf1-x146.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x345.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::345]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayerrmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x345.google.com> Nov 13 22:14:03 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayera@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com>
As you can see, the to-address is generated and its different hosts at google trying to send mails.
Searching for zf.thesparklebar.com shows others having the same problem.
I don't think people appreciate that this is really the key observation here. In large institutions, for anything significant to happen, there have to be incentives and alternatives, and these are set by management. Management in turn usually cares about their incentives, and the company overall mostly cares about the bottom line and the financial reports.
As a result, this is unlikely to get addressed, unless there is significant pressure, like media coverage, people mass-resigning from Gmail, or major email servers blocking Google. But none of these are likely to happen.