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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

"(Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers"

Yes, but, the evil genius of the idea is that the email will be from a gmail domain. Emails from gmail to gmail with your own 5 year old account will have a ridiculous conversion rate. In my tests with email, if the email is from the actual gmail domain other carriers TRUST it more. Spam systems rely heavily on DNS/IPaddresses -- and this bypasses all that.

I feel for the smaller email providers. Gmail wont be able to patch this anytime soon, thus, the smaller ESPs without resources will have to change their rules to make the gmail domain less trusted.

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I don't know about other servers, but on the systems I manage gmail itself is the #1 spam source since 3 years at the very least. If you look at my previous posts, I commented on this two days ago.

There's literally _Zero_ value in DNSBL/DKIM/SPF because of this. Email sent from reputable sources is actually _more_ likely to be spam than small mail servers.

Content-based filters are the only thing that work against this sort of spam.

Following your logic, his idea wouldn't work, and he doesn't make 115k a month. But, clearly, it does [if he isn't lying] - so I am not following.

I'm not contradicting his assertions. I actually confirm them: there is now a lot of spam coming from gmail. He's clearly one of the reasons.

You are correct. :)

I feel uneasy with your reaction.

Maybe reducing the max number of recipients to the hundreds would help reduce the chance for abuse while still keeping your core customer base happy? It might also reduce the risk of getting booted off the Chrome Store.

You're assuming their "core customer base" aren't spammers.

My reaction was simply validating that sending from-gmail to-gmail has high open/conversion rates, as the poster stated. However, you can only do this with a limited number of emails (500/day for Gmail or 2,000/day for G Suite). That's not to say that Google will let ANYTHING be sent between Gmail and G Suite accounts. There are lots of cases where Gmail has blocked its own users from sending to each other.

Google keeps the number pretty low (2000 daily recipients per GSuite user. Less for gmail?)

True spammers are sending spam to many orders of magnitude more recipients. They are not going to use this tool.

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