Personally, I've tried to reach out to Google regarding security issues on blogspot which were affecting our property. There was an XSS vulnerability and we were getting thousands of posts on our blog linking to blogspot which would in turn redirect the user to some pharma site.
It's been months and they haven't really made any progress other than put me in contact with various people who don't respond to email.
If that's how they deal with an open XSS I can only imagine how fast they move to deal with spam like this.
Disclaimer: This isn't a post bashing Google and praising Yahoo - just the only experiences I've had to contribute to this post :).
Not the right motivation and perhaps more harm than good but I'm not 100% sure.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p...
If you are a company that provides spamming capabilities to anyone and everyone, then it is exactly valid to add them to a spam list.
You could say, "Plenty of legitimate users use gmail." Fine, maybe so, but if you are someone who uses gmail, you are surrounded by a cadre of spammers and should understand your credibility is instantly devalued.
Birds of a feather flock together. The solution is to stop using gmail.com.
A VERY VERY high percentage of spam in my inbox comes from gmail accounts. If tens of percentages points of spam is sent from a domain, then it's valid to add them to the list of spamming domains.
it seems that spammers were using docs.google.com to post some documents, which are stored in the same /24 as gmail. Spamhaus decided to blacklist the whole subnet.
Either way I'm not sure that the outcome is going to be good. I'd like it if there were a way to pressure Google into being more responsive about spam issues, but they have little incentive to, beyond keeping it from clogging up their own systems.
I keep getting spam from Yahoo! in the form of people signing me up for some group, just today someone signed me up for the "vjth group" with the group description "iqdjgpwo62r683fs".
There's a link in the E-Mail saying "You may also change your email preferences to prevent group owners from adding you to their groups.". But when I follow it and change my E-Mail preferences I get:
Groups error
We're Sorry...
There was a problem with your request.
The page you've requested returned this error:
If you continue to receive this error for more than
48 hours, please contact our Customer Care team. We
apologize for this inconvenience.
I can't imagine why javascript redirects add much value in a blog post. But everyone picks a different spot between features and security - and that's okay by me.
I've had various SMTP servers (for various companies) blocked by them, usually for very questionable reasons. You used to have to argue with them on their forum (and take a beating from all of the kids on that site) before they'd remove you.
The result is that SMTP admins get it from both sides: Spammers make your life hard, rabid blackhole lists combatting spammers make your life even harder.
I can't send email to gmail addresses -- well sometimes I can and sometimes I can't -- because Google (sometimes) says of my server:
Our system has detected an unusual rate of
550-5.7.1 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked.
We send tiny amounts (3 or 4 a week) of mainly personal email to gmail addresses.
Who do I contact to sort this? Who knows? Google has no point of contact.
So I'm happy for Google to have a taste of their own medicine. And my opinion of them is a rabid group of extreme anti-spammer teenagers.
I see you've never met SORBS. Or even NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email).
Blacklists are a pretty powerful tool to get ISPs and the like to do something about their spam. And Spamhaus is usually right. And yes, I've been on SORBS (due to some other account in the same /24 spamming at some point in the past...)
Spamhaus figured this all out by themselves and took great care not to cause any collateral damage while going after the spammers. Pretty impressive, especially since that would have been very hard to figure out from the outside.
Given the choice between the service Spamhaus' list provides, and being able to receive mail from what's undoubtedly one of the largest webmail providers in the world (the biggest?), a lot of people are going to can Spamhaus.
I'd hope that Google will react by doing something about the spam, but they could much more easily do nothing, put out some recommendation that people stop using Spamhaus, and a lot of people will be forced to do just that (or Spamhaus will blink and un-blacklist Google). They're the 800-pound gorilla in this particular match; Spamhaus isn't a lightweight but I wouldn't put any money on them in that fight.
We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third option now.
Some more (older): http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=google.com
It's a good idea to maintain a local whitelist, or use DNSWL.org or http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Spam_DNS_Lists