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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> get nearly zero spam due to the simple reverse DNS check which catch most of them

On my Fastmail account, 99% of spam comes from a gmail address. I imagine there's a lot more that are filtered upstream with a similar DNS check, but my point is I receive most spam from legitimate addresses on the world's largest email service.

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I feel like 5-10 years ago most of the spam I got was from Yahoo accounts, and sometime in the past few years that's switched over to being mostly Gmail. I used to think that Google was doing something to make it harder for spammers to mass register accounts, but if that's was ever the case, it doesn't seem to be anymore.

As more mail servers use domain reputation to classify (accept/reject) incoming deliveries (helped with dmarc-like policies), messages from gmail.com will get a harder time getting delivered to mail servers they also try to deliver spam to.

This provides natural pressure for gmail to reduce their outgoing spam rate. I'm sure they do try to get outgoing spam down. Spammers are just a resourceful bunch...

Any large free email provider will have these problems. It's a reason to use your own domain for email, with your own reputation, instead of sharing your reputation with the whole world, including spammers.

That's weird, I get zero spam from gmail and my domain is from 2000 so my email addresses are everywhere with catchall on the domain.

I am not doubting you, but did you check that the email was actually coming from google servers?

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