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FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

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Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#121

Post by fhars »

rjmunro wrote: post #116
jstanley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#122

Post by loopdoend »

LiamPowell wrote: post #110
alpaca128 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#123

Post by amichal »

rwmj wrote: post #58
urban_winter wrote: post #26

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.

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).

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

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#124

Post by nucleardog »

rjmunro wrote: post #116
jstanley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#125

Post by TeMPOraL »

rjmunro wrote: post #119
tuetuopay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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.

FWIW, I'm one of such people clicking "mark as spam" on marketing e-mail, and I do it intentionally.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

smallerize wrote: post #120
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Signed up, or were signed up without their knowledge, or were tricked into signing up.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#127

Post by amichal »

amichal wrote: post #123
rwmj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

Edit: 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

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#128

Post by dirkf »

anonymousiam wrote: post #83

Lately I've been using SpamCop.net to make spam reports. It seems to work, and it's free. You are encouraged to donate, and they don't ask for much. It's not perfect though. For some reason, it doesn't find (or deliberately ignores) OVH hosts that are relaying spam.

I've been using SpamCop for years (decades?) but lately I've been wondering if they're still relevant.

One example: they seem to have a size limit of 50KB when you report a spam mail via their web form. I've received quite some spam that exceeds that because they use base64 encoding of the body, add non-visible filler content to drown out the actual spam/phishing message, etc.

SpamCop suggests to cut off the message and still process it but then they miss e.g. the link to the phishing website and thus they can't send out a report for that.

Speaking of phishing links: a lot of the phishing mails I receive, link to some account on storage.googleapis.com. I've seen mails with links to the same account for weeks on end before they switch to a different one, implying that these links remain online for a long time. You would think that marking such mails as phishing in GMail (they are already flagged as spam) would get them on some kind of radar but apparently not...

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#129

Post by ModernMech »

Ah yes, the tried and true method of getting into contact with someone at google: sending a blast to social media for an actual human, because Google literally makes it impossible to talk to anyone at all. Worst customer support in all of tech.

Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

#130

Post by ModernMech »

ilamont wrote: post #105

I got a human being at Google to look into my problem and take action after sending a police report to Google‘s legal department certified mail return receipt along with a letter describing how someone was impersonating me and my business using a Gmail address in an attempt to commit fraud. Yes, it was a pain to take all of these steps and it probably took about 3 hours but it was absolutely necessary considering the…

Oh that's a good idea! I got locked out of my YouTube premium account and they kept charging me. Couldn't get in contact with anyone at YouTube because the YT premium support line is behind the YT login. So I had to change my credit card number. Somehow they still kept billing the card, so the credit card company said they'd have to close my account entirely to get Google to stop billing me for a service they wouldn't let me cancel.
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