[dingdingding]

I know the google fanboys will hate this, but the problem is letting just anyone or just any machine create an account and use your service. It's google's responsibility to can the spam coming from their domain. Google doesn't care though. If they make it harder to get a gmail account, then they make it harder to spam their "legitimate" users with advertisements and why would they want to do that?

If you are a company that provides spamming capabilities to anyone and everyone, then it is exactly valid to add them to a spam list.

You could say, "Plenty of legitimate users use gmail." Fine, maybe so, but if you are someone who uses gmail, you are surrounded by a cadre of spammers and should understand your credibility is instantly devalued.

Birds of a feather flock together. The solution is to stop using gmail.com.

A VERY VERY high percentage of spam in my inbox comes from gmail accounts. If tens of percentages points of spam is sent from a domain, then it's valid to add them to the list of spamming domains.

[bmm6o]

> Fine, maybe so, but if you are someone who uses gmail, you are surrounded by a cadre of spammers and should understand your credibility is instantly devalued.

"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.

[barrkel]

Perhaps, instead, you should try using a better spam blocking system. Gmail's system works quite well.

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.

[scott_s]

You get spam in your inbox? I see maybe one a month. Gmail filters it for me.

[tptacek]

I'm guessing it's not the "google fanboys" who hate this sentiment, so much as it is the people who expect to be able to use email instead of sacrificing chickens to the sysadmin/net-abuse gods.

[dingdingding]

"expect to be able to use email" This just summarizes the problem. People "expect" to use a free email system and still be treated equally to those who pay good money for a legitimate SMTP host that cares about the quality of service they provide to their customers.

Legitimate email providers take measures to ensure their customers aren't spammers and those who don't end up on the spammer lists and this is exactly the way it should be.

Until Google takes a stand against the spammers who use their systems, they should be on the list just like all the others.

[barrkel]

You wouldn't happen to be in the business of providing paid email accounts, would you?

[jacquesm]

No, he's just a troll. Expect him to delete his postings in a couple of minutes, he pulled that trick the other day.

[bmm6o]

The posts were deleted (in bad faith, it seems), but they seem to have been undeleted. Thanks admin!

[jacquesm]

Good warning to others pulling that stunt.

tx pg

[jmathai]

TLDR; It's a tough problem to which I have no suggestions.

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.