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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 sendi
by urban_winter 6mo 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.
- cpncrunch 6mo agoSo, just to clarify, the salespeople are spamming cold addresses, or are they opted in or existing customers?
- bdavbdav 6mo agoWas 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 6mo agoMailchimp 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 6mo agoThis seems to be a laughable claim? I don't get anything but spam from Mailchimp.
- cpncrunch 6mo agoNo, 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?
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoIndeed, Mailchimp is a tool specifically built and advertised to send spam.
- cpncrunch 6mo agoWhere does it say on their website that it is specifically for sending spam?
- tuetuopay 6mo agoSomeone’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.
- cpncrunch 6mo agoSpam is defined as unsolicited bulk email. Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.
- rascul 6mo ago100% of marketing email I've received is spam. I didn't knowingly or willingly sign up for any of it. There's some delusion in the marketing world that just because someone places an order or creates an account they should be spammed.
- cpncrunch 6mo agoYes, I used to agree with that, but have since given in and accepted that most companies (except mine and a handful of others) will spam all customers who buy a product without asking them first. It's a little irritating, although I reserve full enmity for the spammers who I've never interacted with ever.
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo ago
- rjmunro 6mo agoI 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.
- fhars 6mo ago> 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.
- nucleardog 6mo ago> 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.
- rwmj 6mo agoI 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).
- amichal 6mo agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_Reporting_Format How to bulk do this is interesting too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) 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
- amichal 6mo agoEdit: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/leveraging-gmail-feedback-loop-identifiers https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/leveraging-gmail-... Shows you how to use googles thing if you are a sender to know if @gmail folks are reporting you. It doesnt address what to do if someone's @gmail is doing this to you (a workspace custom domain yes)... @gmail are rate-limited to a few 1000s per day per gmail address but this is still a lot obviously
- p4bl0 6mo 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 6mo agoSpam 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 6mo agoStandardized 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 6mo agoMaybe 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 6mo agoMarking a mail as spam locally is different from spam reporting
- delfinom 6mo agohttps://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse You can use this form >They should at least be good citizen on the sending side, which it seems they're not. They are killing email. Eh? They do tons in anti-bot detection. But the value in exploiting and using Google's service is extremely high so bot authors are increasingly getting creative. Google stops running Gmail and simply another service becomes a high value target. At least Microsoft fixed their Azure abuse after 10 years of not giving a fuck. It used to be stupid fucking easy to setup a trial O365 tenant and spam the fucking internet through "onmicrosoft.com" domains. And they let that go for 10 years.
- smolder 6mo agoI 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.
- Fokamul 6mo agoI 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.
- zelphirkalt 6mo agoHow would it even be possible to name a service "Google helpdesk - password reset" or something like that, without being insta banned? Obvious fraud in the making, not getting recognized?
- noobermin 6mo agoI hope you realise, it does sound like you are suggesting that salespeople in your company are essentially spammers.