Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus
blog.sucuri.net
blog.sucuri.net
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 :).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
tx pg
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.
Not the right motivation and perhaps more harm than good but I'm not 100% sure.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p...
it seems that spammers were using docs.google.com to post some documents, which are stored in the same /24 as gmail. Spamhaus decided to blacklist the whole subnet.
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.
I can't imagine why javascript redirects add much value in a blog post. But everyone picks a different spot between features and security - and that's okay by me.
There are a lot of people that have used blogspot as their host for a long time, but then decide to get their own domain and don't want to lose their readers. That's the motivation I've heard for allowing redirects in the past, though I don't know what the current policy is.
Blogspot is a lot more like a hosting service than an application in terms of what it allows, probably because it's one of the oldest.
I keep getting spam from Yahoo! in the form of people signing me up for some group, just today someone signed me up for the "vjth group" with the group description "iqdjgpwo62r683fs".
There's a link in the E-Mail saying "You may also change your email preferences to prevent group owners from adding you to their groups.". But when I follow it and change my E-Mail preferences I get:
Groups error
We're Sorry...
There was a problem with your request.
The page you've requested returned this error:
If you continue to receive this error for more than
48 hours, please contact our Customer Care team. We
apologize for this inconvenience.
I've had various SMTP servers (for various companies) blocked by them, usually for very questionable reasons. You used to have to argue with them on their forum (and take a beating from all of the kids on that site) before they'd remove you.
The result is that SMTP admins get it from both sides: Spammers make your life hard, rabid blackhole lists combatting spammers make your life even harder.
I can't send email to gmail addresses -- well sometimes I can and sometimes I can't -- because Google (sometimes) says of my server:
Our system has detected an unusual rate of
550-5.7.1 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked.
We send tiny amounts (3 or 4 a week) of mainly personal email to gmail addresses.
Who do I contact to sort this? Who knows? Google has no point of contact.
So I'm happy for Google to have a taste of their own medicine. And my opinion of them is a rabid group of extreme anti-spammer teenagers.
I see you've never met SORBS. Or even NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email).
Blacklists are a pretty powerful tool to get ISPs and the like to do something about their spam. And Spamhaus is usually right. And yes, I've been on SORBS (due to some other account in the same /24 spamming at some point in the past...)
An IP will do.
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.
Spamhaus figured this all out by themselves and took great care not to cause any collateral damage while going after the spammers. Pretty impressive, especially since that would have been very hard to figure out from the outside.
Some more (older): http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=google.com
We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third option now.
It's a good idea to maintain a local whitelist, or use DNSWL.org or http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Spam_DNS_Lists