google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers?

Sat Feb 6 16:38:43 UTC 2010

Hello nanog,

I was pointed to the recent thread about Google Groups spammers and
thought I'd throw out a few comments. Keeping Google free of spam, and
keeping the wider internet community on our side is important to us.

By the time I looked at it, the account named by Jim was already shut
down as part of a systematic anti-abuse sweep. We automatically
identify and shut down many accounts every day and this account was no
different. The nature of providing free email services at scale is
that abuse is inevitable and the only way to tackle it is with
automation, so hopefully you can understand that we may not always be
as responsive to ad hoc manual reports as would be ideal.

Google Groups spam specifically is something we started seriously
tackling only recently. Doing it as well as GMail required a rewrite
of the rather old groups backend. It's already improved dramatically
in the past few months and it is continuing to get better rapidly as
we close the remaining holes.

On the question of caring, we do care about spam of all kinds, both
inbound and outbound, and have a large anti abuse team dedicated to
stopping spammers. This is a difficult problem - there is a dedicated
underground economy of people who spend all day reverse engineering
our systems so they can sell accounts and mail relay services to
other, less capable individuals. But I think it's fair to say we're
ahead of the game here - for example, Google is the only major webmail
provider I know of that has aggressively deployed SMS verification.

Thanks for the feedback. Google wants to be the best netizen possible,
and we know getting spam from google IPs is frustrating - we're on it.

/mike

--
GMail Engineering
Google Switzerland GmbH