Sweet so is Google a Spammer Now?
May 13 2008
Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server… so does this mean that they should be blacklisted? How does an issue like this when it comes from an ISP deserve to be treated by other ISPs? Do they give a courtesy to one another when this happens? I know that if it happens to a corporate mail server it gets slammed and blocked faster than me accepting and Irish Car Bomb drink on St. Pats. AND that is fast.
Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server A newfound flaw in Google’s Gmail allows would-be spammers to treat the service as an open-relay server. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo “trust” Gmail. This may facilitate e-mail delivery, but it also makes it easier for spammers to reach their intended targets.
Published in Deliverability, ISP Relations, Spam Emails, The Spam Cops on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
(No Ratings Yet) 
Loading ...
May 13th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Sausage, an anonymous contributor to Box of Meat, had an interesting take on this study:
http://boxofmeat.net/post/34454023
For additional perspective, though, I should add that it’s overly simplistic to claim that ’services such as Hotmail and Yahoo “trust” Gmail.’ Anyone doing reputation calculations will quickly see that you can’t hold ISPs & freemail providers to the exact same thresholds as email marketers: marketers control their entire mailstream, while ISPs have end users. ISPs will kick off end users who do bad things, while most marketers will keep sending until something external forces them to stop.
The thresholds for entirely unknown IPs tend to be even lower, because most of those are botnets sending the worst kinds of spam.
For years, spammers have been creating freemail accounts en masse and then sending through them to other ISPs & freemail providers. It can be difficult to for the ISPs to control, because they don’t want to harm their real users.
I would strongly urge anyone in the email marketing industry to pay attention to spammers’ tactics, both to avoid acting like spammers and to understand why ISPs react the ways they do.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Hey, thanks for approving my comment!