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
#92Google 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.
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.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.
But theres not even that going on. Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a signif…
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.
Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader > ridiculous assertion. What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free .
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
One well-known rejection of the Borkian view is in Lina Khan "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" paper. https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
(I can't find a copy of that source online, but you can see the quote at https://archive.org/details/traderegulationc0005pito/mode/2u... where Pitofsky rejects viewing antitrust law through an exclusively economic lens.)
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
In the name of national security, of course.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mailchimp 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.
This seems to be a laughable claim? I don't get anything but spam from Mailchimp.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#96Google 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.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#97I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from. At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness.…
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#98Google Workspace email is very generous with the kind of outgoing email you can send via their SMTP servers.
Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#99Re: FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account
#100I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from. At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness.…
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.