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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

It's just you. Mine are from owned domains and Gmail.

Google has a problem where if you pay for a workspace account (or maybe even trial?) you get a temporary trust, which you can abuse for spamming, that gmail.com users don't get. So people open farms of workspace accounts (with fake id/ stolen CC?) and go wild.

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I'm amazed at how much obvious spam I block from Google. A huge chunk of it is 419 stuff that's trivially caught by SpamAssassin rules that took 5-10 min to write[0].

My guess is that the Gmail team doesn't have any OKRs about spam prevention any more, or else they'd be able to pretty quickly put a stop to the top ~90% of the spam that's currently getting through.

I wish the anti-trust regulators were competent and paying attention. If so, they might be able to do something about the fact that Google—unlike pretty much every other large mail sender in existence—fights really, really hard to avoid taking abuse reports. Gmail is "too big to fail" so we can't just block them outright, like Google would do to us if we were the ones sending a bunch of spam and ignoring abuse reports.

[0] (edited to add) For those who are curious or wish to share the fruits of my labor:

  body            __DWP_BIZ_PROPOSAL        /\b(business|confidential|discrete|mutual|beneficial|profitable|investment|favou?rable)\s+(proposals?|opportunit(y|ies)|friendships?|director(y|ies)|intentions?|introductions?|relationships?|business(es)?|investments?|transactions?)\b/i
  body            __DWP_DECEASED            /\b((deceased|deposed|exiled|late)\s+(former\s+|ex[ -])?(ceo|husband|client|(vice[ -])?president|senator|[mb]illionaire|brother|sister|(great[ -])?((grand-?)?((fa|mo)ther|parent)|uncle|aunt)s?)|widow(er)?|beneficiar(y|ies)|inherit[ea]nce|last will and testament)\b/i
  meta            DWP_419                   __DWP_DECEASED && __DWP_BIZ_PROPOSAL  && (FREEMAIL_FROM || FREEMAIL_REPLY)

There are some other rules this works in conjunction with, but stopping the obvious spam is really not rocket science.

LOL that was a Procmail flashback from twenty years ago!

What happened to Bayesian detection and AI?

They work, too. But sometimes simpler solutions work better.

SpamAssassin assigns a score (positive = more spammy, negative = more hammy) to each rule. So the above-quoted rules work in conjunction with other rules, the Bayes filter, IP/ASN reputation data, etc. DWP_419 has a really high score in my setup right now because the false positive rate is currently zero, but it could theoretically be canceled out by other signals.

98% of spam I receive originates from Google Mail. Trying to forward such an email through many other providers instantly generates a SMTP reject message, so there’s really no way Google couldn’t do it as well. Reporting spam has also become way harder than it needs to be. And no ones dares block Google, not to mention that, like Microsoft, they use so many outgoing IPs, it’s plain ineffective. So both simply stopped caring because it’s cheaper and they will not suffer any consequences.

They also host known spam operations like Advids for years. They’ve basically become a bulletproof spam hoster.

My fastmail just gets spammed by gmail.

Like 99% of it is coming from a gmail account. And very formulaic. I wonder why gmail claims to have an excellent spam checker, but they don't check for outgoing spam from their platform.

It could only hurt their own users to filter outbound mail, and they gain nothing from it until people are willing to block gmail (not likely).

Just checked the 14 latest mails in my spam folder. Every single one from a different custom domain.

I have one from outlook.com, about 2/3 are custom domains (.com and .br), and the rest are from google domains.

Never bothered to look until now but the junk folder on my office 365 email is showing various messages from outlook.com and Gmail.

Not sure why they allow people to send from known spam accounts on their own system.

Lately that's the way it's been for me for technology or marketing services spam to my own custom gmail domain used for business.

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