"My credibility"? When I send my mom an email, I expect her to get it. When she sends me one, I expect to get it.

>Birds of a feather flock together.

Yes, because I am a spammer.</sarcasm>

If gmail has a lot of spammers using their service, they should address this. But the suggestion that those caught in the crossfire should know better is one of the more frustrating things about black-listers.

I personally wouldn't touch Spamhaus with a ten foot pole. From everything I hear, they seem seriously biased towards incorrectly blacklisting IPs than letting a few bad ones through; more highly favouring false positives than false negatives in terms of identifying malice, in other words. Thing is, I believe most reasonable people prefer the reverse trade-off; they would rather get a little more spam than risk losing email.

It's not just Google. Trust me when I say that combating spam is a full time ongoing job that never ever ends and you never ever win.

I do agree that it's the responsibility of the email provider to mitigate spam but it's an incredibly difficult task to accomplish with near zero false positives.

Perhaps Google could do a better job but restricting the "open" nature of signing up for and using email is not the solution. If Google does that then someone else will offer it unrestricted.

It's simply too cheap for spammers to send emails. Identifying usage patterns and rate limiting or gasp charging based on them would be a step in the right direction. But that means losing users which in itself has tremendous cost.