Not me, but then most people are allergic to paying $10 a month.

I figure an email is worth a beer.

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.

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.

Yeah, Salesforce clearly has some kind of whitelisting at Gmail. I get so much nonsense from that domain.

I hope you realise, it does sound like you are suggesting that salespeople in your company are essentially spammers.

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.

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).

> 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.

So, just to clarify, the salespeople are spamming cold addresses, or are they opted in or existing customers?

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.

Not an expert, but AFAIK 450 is a non-permanent error that basically says "try again later".

Most of the salespeople in any company are spammers.

Google makes loads of money through scam ads and fake/AI slop videos. Anyone trying to get in the way of that is putting Google's profits at risk, hence why they shut down legitimate accounts but scammers just run free.

Bot comments and uploads count in KPIs. Blocking/Removing bots = KPIs look worse.

I did some tiny digging because I remembered that there is a way to report individual messages in a structured machine readable way to abuse@ for these things --- i suspect that this is technically supported by gmail (if not given a lot of signal weight)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_Reporting_Format

How to bulk do this is interesting too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) says that gmail has a bulk format and that sendgrid is seeing some success.

Not defending just trying to see what a technical solution looks like

> 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.

They're not trying. I've seen an advertiser remain active for months with literally tens of thousands of ads where clicking them directly downloads a malicious exe file that most antivirus scanners flag.

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.

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.

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.

Add Mailchimp in there as well. I have never gotten an email from someone using Mailchimp that was not spam.

Gmail is profitable. How much harm should profitable services be allowed to perpetuate in the world to enable their profit?

Gmail shows ads to make money so it is not loss making. Google Workspace charges money per user (and still offers abysmal support).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Based on how much zendesk spam there is i doubt it.

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)

It most certainly does in the UK.

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.

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?

Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?

Tech support scams still?! I don't even understand how this is possible. If Google wanted to they could come up with the tech to bypass the spam/scammers own ghosting system. They must have some kind of invisible Google bot that checks for downloads/scams, right?

Phone providers should also be detecting this with AI. There is no way this should be occurring anymore.

They make money on those ads, you’re asking a mega corporation to make less money. Good luck.

Marking a mail as spam locally is different from spam reporting

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.

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...

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.

> Gmail is not a monopoly.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

This seems to be a laughable claim? I don't get anything but spam from Mailchimp.

Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.

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.

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?

I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway. They often use fraudulent tricks to try to get the email through filters, such as fake from addresses.

Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them. That's legitimate marketing emails. You might argue they also shouldn't exist, but they are a different category.

I get plenty of the second from mailchimp (it's what they do), almost none of the first. Marking the second kind as spam, rather than clicking the unsubscribe link is dangerous because it teaches your anti-spam filter to reject messages from legitimate companies. You might find that if they need to contact you for a genuine reason e.g. a reciept for a future transaction, the message is blocked.

Indeed, Mailchimp is a tool specifically built and advertised to send spam.

So, Google built a superior product that is profitable and we are supposed to be mad about this?

> I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway.

I don't get _only_ this from Mailchimp, but I definitely get quite a bit of this from Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and others. I've marked it spam, reported it to them (no response), and continued to receive the emails.

I can be kind of scatter brained and generally give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it's pretty clear that, e.g., I most definitely did not sign up with some accountant in a different country, in a place I've never been to, to receive reminders of tax deadlines that don't apply to me and offers of accounting services I can't use. Or if I somehow did, the signup was deceptive enough that they never received meaningful consent and I'd call it spam anyway.

(And the email they're sending this to is not some easily confused gmail address or a fat finger--it's my own name at my own domain.)

Having valid contact details or an opt out on their sign up form isn't relevant given I never signed up. It's _unsolicited_, _bulk_ email. It's spam.

> an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them

This is the textbook legal definition of spam in any sensible jurisdiction, though.

Mailchimp is for sending emails that people signed up to receive. If enough recipients click "unsubscribe", the whole email campaign gets suspended.

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".

Where does it say on their website that it is specifically for sending spam?

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.

Someone’s marketing emails are someone else’s spam.

Mailchimp is specifically made for mass email emission, for marketing a newsletter and whatnot. So yeah, a lot of people will consider them spammers.

Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk email. Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.

I think thats a really wrong definition of spam. Spam is untargeted junk from people you don't know, who are probably hiding there real identity using fake email headers etc. If it's a legit company with legit unsubscribe options, it's not spam.

It worries me a lot that people clicking "mark as spam" on messages from legit companies because they subscribed to the newsletter will mean that my messages with important information (order confirmations, e-tickets etc.) will get blocked.

That's a spammer's definition. Everyone else's definition is that spam is unsolicited e-mail. Which covers most marketing e-mail, and not just the cold messages, but especially marketing e-mail from vendors you had interacted with in some way in the past.

> It worries me a lot that people clicking "mark as spam" on messages from legit companies because they subscribed to the newsletter will mean that my messages with important information (order confirmations, e-tickets etc.) will get blocked.

They probably didn't subscribe to the newsletter, they were subscribed, or tricked into subscribing. Either way, it's spam, and legitimate companies do not mix transactional e-mail ("order confirmations, e-tickets, etc.") with marketing e-mail.