Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

... but wholesale DNS-based blacklisting could never blow up in our faces. Noooooo sir.

I work at Yahoo! and we've been blacklisted as well by Spamhaus. I wouldn't say it's entirely inappropriate because of the sheer volume of email that can pass through our (or in this case Gmail's) system.

Personally, I've tried to reach out to Google regarding security issues on blogspot which were affecting our property. There was an XSS vulnerability and we were getting thousands of posts on our blog linking to blogspot which would in turn redirect the user to some pharma site.

It's been months and they haven't really made any progress other than put me in contact with various people who don't respond to email.

If that's how they deal with an open XSS I can only imagine how fast they move to deal with spam like this.

Disclaimer: This isn't a post bashing Google and praising Yahoo - just the only experiences I've had to contribute to this post :).

Seems like it might be biting off a bit more than they can chew.

Given the choice between the service Spamhaus' list provides, and being able to receive mail from what's undoubtedly one of the largest webmail providers in the world (the biggest?), a lot of people are going to can Spamhaus.

I'd hope that Google will react by doing something about the spam, but they could much more easily do nothing, put out some recommendation that people stop using Spamhaus, and a lot of people will be forced to do just that (or Spamhaus will blink and un-blacklist Google). They're the 800-pound gorilla in this particular match; Spamhaus isn't a lightweight but I wouldn't put any money on them in that fight.

I interpreted that sentence to mean that the decision was not accidental but purposeful on Spamhaus' part; if it's accidental then it's slightly different (actually it makes me think somewhat less of Spamhaus, because it's sloppy).

Either way I'm not sure that the outcome is going to be good. I'd like it if there were a way to pressure Google into being more responsive about spam issues, but they have little incentive to, beyond keeping it from clogging up their own systems.

Yeah, this is why I don't use Spamhaus blacklists.