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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

#161

Post by rubyfan »

ceejayoz wrote: post #134
ModernMech wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

That's a built-in thing; Visa, MasterCard, Amex all have updater services that ensure trusted merchants get the replacement card seamlessly. This leads to annoying edge cases like yours. https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-a-card-account-upd... You can sometimes ask your bank to issue a card and not ping the updater service, but tier one support tends… not to know about it at all.

BoA issued me a new card after a fraudulent charge, the next year on the same date the same fraudulent charge showed up (annual billing cycle). This happened for more than three years because after they issued a new card they updated the service that billed the fraud with the new number.

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

#162

Post by vk6flab »

silvershell wrote: post #154
avian wrote: post #144

Somewhat related to spam coming from Google servers, maybe someone can shed some light on what could be the motivation behind this activity: In recent months I'm seeing instances where random personal mail accounts on a server I run would receive a barrage of mail in a short amount of time. Mail seems to be bounced via Google Groups - they are sent from Google's IPs and have headers like X-Google-Group-Id, List-*, et…

Yes. I got the same issue… and when someone replies, all users in the mailing list receive it… that’s why I would see a ton of replies saying please remove me from your mailing list. Very annoying. The only solution I found was to create an inbox rule to reject those, as I couldn’t unsubscribe

The headers actually contain an unsubscribe email address that actually works.

The format is something like googlegroups-manage+{groupName}+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com

Just send an email there and they stop coming (for that list).

Source: I was getting spam like this, a fellow victim did some tests and confirmed that it stopped the onslaught of messages.

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

#163

Post by titzer »

ModernMech wrote: post #130
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'…

You have to realize that once Google flips the bit on you and they think you are trying to scam them (or others via them) you are absolutely dead to them. They don't want to hear from you ever again. You're banned to hell. The fact that a billing system didn't get switched off isn't so surprising; the internal architecture of their systems is so complicated that it would take multiple human lifetimes to explain how it all works.

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

#164

Post by jeroenhd »

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 disagree, I get plenty of spam from Mailchimp. Spammers seem to be able to add email addresses to Mailchimp without verification, and they just keep making new accounts/"campaigns" to re-add my email addresses.

Legitimate companies like to not provide the legally-required opt-in flow and assume consent without ever enabling or disabling a consent checkbox. That is spam too.

It's on Mailchimp to not take business from companies that abuse their system. If they get flagged as spam and their other customers have delivery issues because of that, I see that as a feature, not a bug.

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

#165

Post by mschuster91 »

mixologic wrote: post #157
MisterTea wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called a monopoly. I know people who run their own mail servers to be as independent as possible. Ironically, they show up as spam in Gmail all the time because "This message is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." Meanwhile, it's a fucking simple one paragraph message to a programming mailing list. They have to wrestle with DMARK or choose not to as they feel DMARK is playing into t…

DMARC isn't really that big of an issue to wrestle with, and I don't see how it gives anybody influence or power.

The thing is, it's a mess to set up if you are not doing it correctly - which is all too easy if you are not doing this day-to-day.

Spammers however, they have an economic incentive to have experts set up SPF, DMARC and all the other crap to appear legitimate.

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

#166

Post by dec0dedab0de »

subroutine wrote: post #14
noobermin wrote: post #4

It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only provider and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.

Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?

Enough that they're not facilitating abuse.

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

#167

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

cpncrunch wrote: post #118
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.

Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk email. Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.

> Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.

Yes, this excludes any people, customers or otherwise, who did not knowingly and willingly opt-in to specifically receive marketing emails / promotional emails / any other unnecessary emails.

A good heuristic is: if somebody receives an email from you that they do not want, there's a good chance you're spamming them: maybe by calling a marketing email, an "update" instead; maybe because you didn't make it abundantly clear to them when they opted-in that they would receive emails of that type.

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

#168

Post by eblume »

ilamont wrote: post #159
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…

Wasn't expecting this comment to go far. This took place about a month ago. For those who are interested, here is the address I sent the police report and cover letter to: Google LLC Attn: Legal Department – Custodian of Records 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 In the cover letter I outlined the problem and the desired remedy (shut down the gmail account and preserve IP and other information for law…

Having worked in compliance engineering I have also reported through the IC3 portal, and spoken with lawyers and analysts who register with FinCEN (which, to be clear, is maybe just a step beyond "My Uncle works at Nintendo...") and I have heard that those reports do get reviewed and often acted on, but yes, you will typically never hear back from them. (FinCEN has its own reporting structure, but we also submitted certain reports through the IC3 portal as well.)

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

#169

Post by rationalist »

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…

> Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before

It's very rare, but I get those types of spam emails from MailChimp.

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

#170

Post by tombrandis »

mschuster91 wrote: post #165
mixologic wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMARC isn't really that big of an issue to wrestle with, and I don't see how it gives anybody influence or power.

The thing is, it's a mess to set up if you are not doing it correctly - which is all too easy if you are not doing this day-to-day. Spammers however, they have an economic incentive to have experts set up SPF, DMARC and all the other crap to appear legitimate.

I think that this is overstated, it takes ~15 minutes to set up SPF and DMARC correctly and few people run their own email servers.

https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie/anti-spoofing-dkim-spf...

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