FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from.

At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness. Even in this discussion: how many people use Gmail as their primary email service?

I got a human being at Google to look into my problem and take action after sending a police report to Google‘s legal department certified mail return receipt along with a letter describing how someone was impersonating me and my business using a Gmail address in an attempt to commit fraud.

Yes, it was a pain to take all of these steps and it probably took about 3 hours but it was absolutely necessary considering there was no avenue for me to shut down this person otherwise.

I was getting spam called constantly every 5 minutes (blocked by Google call screening) and the attackers made an error if sending a message with their AWS bucket url. I was able to submit an abuse report to Amazon and puff Amazon dismantled the entire spam group. No more spam since then.

Maybe try saying the spam has porn or inappropriate images?

I have been observing this for the last 2-3 years (4 postfix servers sysadmin)

Gmail cannot be whitelisted anymore: spam, phishing,... On the other hand, if your users redirect twitter or linkedin notifications from their domain to a gmail account, Google claims you are sending too fast and is suspicious (and throttles or blocks ip).

Hilarious.

Google suspend email accounts that get lots of spam reports. It happens a couple of times a year for salespeople in my company who use Gmass (a bulk email sending tool).

I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.

I’m old enough to remember when the FSF said that blocking spam was censorship. Good to see them wake up.

I'm reporting every spamm mail that I get through Gmail from Gmail accounts but it doesn't seem to help!

Unfortunately, the only thing that would work is to hire a bot service that would report the offending account en masse.

gmail, outlook and salesforce create about 90% of the spam that gets through blacklists. Salesforce is simple to fix: I just block anything from salesforce from our network, as it just seems to be 100% used by spammers. Gmail and outlook are the major problem, as there is no way of addressing their spam issue.

someone hooked up their web app to Google Workspace email and the web app got pwned.

Google Workspace email is very generous with the kind of outgoing email you can send via their SMTP servers.

I wonder if this has to do with the massive number of google calendar invites I’ve been getting as payment/billing notifications lately.

I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them

Crazy that you can even send that sort of volume from a gmail acc

It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only provider and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.

Lately I've been using SpamCop.net to make spam reports. It seems to work, and it's free. You are encouraged to donate, and they don't ask for much.

It's not perfect though. For some reason, it doesn't find (or deliberately ignores) OVH hosts that are relaying spam.

It seems weird that Google wouldn't have some kind of observability alert on outgoing email. 10k emails per week is a lot.

Google removed humans, so ... anyone able to contact real people at Google?

Spammer must be a whale spending untold amounts on other Google services.

Had Google trying to send me mails to non-existing mail-addresses over months. You would think their logs might catch something like that or they would react to my complaints ... they don't and they just dont care.

It sometimes stops for weeks, then it continiues.

from my logs as an example: Nov 13 22:10:51 bert postfix/smtpd[2693931]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-oi1-x248.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-oi1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:07 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-ua1-x948.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::948]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-ua1-x948.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:18 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x346.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::346]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x346.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:37 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lf1-x146.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::146]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lf1-x146.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x345.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::345]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x345.google.com> Nov 13 22:14:03 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <[email protected]>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com>

As you can see, the to-address is generated and its different hosts at google trying to send mails.

Searching for zf.thesparklebar.com shows others having the same problem.

Good luck. These big tech companies have no incentive to care about support or really anything that isn’t tied directly to making money. And unless you have a friend there, Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.

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Maybe they should try getting a paid Google Workspace subscription /s

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