It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider) customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses. Princeses

It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider) customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses. Princeses were the customres which sometimes required a lot of customer support, but paid really well because they purchased a lot of services/VM's. Hobbits were customers who basically minded their own business, and didn't guy a lot of stuff, but didn't cause any problems. Lizardmen were customers which had possibly clueless marketing departments that would occasionally send e-mail marketing campaigns which crossed the line, but which also sent plenty of legitimate e-mails, and which were mostly trainable after the ISP/cloud provider smacked them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper --- and Kobolds were spamvertising companies that did nothing but send spam, and were constantly switching ip addresses / VM's, and knew d*mn well that they were doing something evil, and were not trainable. The problem is that if the ISP / cloud provider has the vast majority of their customers being Kobolds and Lizardmen, it becomes economically hard to just cut off the bad actors, because the vast majority of their customer base are bad actors. If the provider originally had a good mix of all of these customer mixes, but wasn't proactively cutting off the Kobolds and educating the Lizardmen, then their network block would start getting a bad reputation, and all of the major e-mail providers (not just GMail) would start blacklisting the netblock, or at the very least, treating any e-mail sent from that network block as a strong SPAM signal, and this would cause the other customer types to find other providers. So if you happen to be a customer of such a network/cloud provider, you could try complaining to the provider, but they are really in between a rock and a hard place, because if you're the 1 good hobbit and all of the otheer customers for that provider are Kobolds and Lizardmen, what is the provider supposed to do? You're probably better off switching to a better provider. Unfortunately, the better provider may also cost more, but you get what you pay for.