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

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jim at reptiles

Feb 3, 2010, 10:07 PM

Post #1 of 10 (1232 views)
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google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers?

we have recently started getting alot of spam, out of dubai, from "ecampaigners.dxb [at] gmail"

all of the spam comes from/through google and google groups.

is this accepted/supported activity on google?

if not, where might i find a contact who can cluefully respond?

--
Jim Mercer jim [at] reptiles +92 336 520-4504
"I'm Prime Minister of Canada, I live here and I'm going to take a leak."
- Lester Pearson in 1967, during a meeting between himself and
President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had taken over
Pearson's cottage retreat. At one point, a Johnson guard asked
Pearson, "Who are you and where are you going?"

ops.lists at gmail

Feb 3, 2010, 11:05 PM

Post #2 of 10 (1194 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

abuse [at] gmail maybe? Looks like some random spammer based in Dubai
judging by the airport code.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Jim Mercer <jim [at] reptiles> wrote:
> we have recently started getting alot of spam, out of dubai, from "ecampaigners.dxb [at] gmail"
>
> all of the spam comes from/through google and google groups.
>
> is this accepted/supported activity on google?
>
> if not, where might i find a contact who can cluefully respond?

--
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists [at] gmail)

jim at reptiles

Feb 3, 2010, 11:12 PM

Post #3 of 10 (1192 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 12:35:06PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> abuse [at] gmail maybe? Looks like some random spammer based in Dubai
> judging by the airport code.

yeah, tried that several times. seems to go to a black hole.

i've engaged the spammer, and they are telling me that they feel it is ok to
subscribe people to their group, because it sends out a subscription notice,
as well as an unsubscribe link.

they seem to be quite happy to use an @gmail account, and use google groups to
propagate their spam.

most recently, i got from them: "Yes you are right, you can complain to Google, but to complain, you have a right email address, because this address we don't have listed."

so, they are not concerned about being reported to google.

very odd.

is this a legitimate google groups activity?

someone can set up and say "well, yeah, he musta gone to one of our websites
or something, how else would he get on our list?"

and google is ok with that?

geez, "do no harm"

really?

--jim

>
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Jim Mercer <jim [at] reptiles> wrote:
> > we have recently started getting alot of spam, out of dubai, from "ecampaigners.dxb [at] gmail"
> >
> > all of the spam comes from/through google and google groups.
> >
> > is this accepted/supported activity on google?
> >
> > if not, where might i find a contact who can cluefully respond?
>
>
>
> --
> Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists [at] gmail)

--
Jim Mercer jim [at] reptiles +92 336 520-4504
"I'm Prime Minister of Canada, I live here and I'm going to take a leak."
- Lester Pearson in 1967, during a meeting between himself and
President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had taken over
Pearson's cottage retreat. At one point, a Johnson guard asked
Pearson, "Who are you and where are you going?"

david at blue-labs

Feb 3, 2010, 11:49 PM

Post #4 of 10 (1185 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

Google groups cautions you about pre-emptively adding people if you
choose this method of subscribing them.

On 02/04/10 02:12, Jim Mercer wrote:
> [...]
> and google is ok with that?
>
> geez, "do no harm"
>
> really?
>
> --jim

jim at reptiles

Feb 3, 2010, 11:56 PM

Post #5 of 10 (1195 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 02:49:42AM -0500, David Ford wrote:
> Google groups cautions you about pre-emptively adding people if you
> choose this method of subscribing them.

"here, have some free guns. oh, by the way, its probably bad if you go around
shooting people, so don't do that."

it is starting too look to me like google is quite happy to host spammers.

or, at best, doesn't care if spammers use them to host their services.

> On 02/04/10 02:12, Jim Mercer wrote:
> > [...]
> > and google is ok with that?
> >
> > geez, "do no harm"
> >
> > really?
> >
> > --jim
>

--
Jim Mercer jim [at] reptiles +92 336 520-4504
"I'm Prime Minister of Canada, I live here and I'm going to take a leak."
- Lester Pearson in 1967, during a meeting between himself and
President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had taken over
Pearson's cottage retreat. At one point, a Johnson guard asked
Pearson, "Who are you and where are you going?"

david at blue-labs

Feb 4, 2010, 12:29 AM

Post #6 of 10 (1196 views)
Permalink

Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

I feel fairly sure in saying that most mailing list software, newsgroup
software, and communication software in general, will allow you to
preemptively add people to your address book, subscription lists, etc.
Every router and switch out there allows forged packets through them,
should we lambast the hardware manufacturers even though numerous
accompanying handbooks recommend good practice configurations?

Google has been very quick to deal with issues of spammers every time I
have brought it up.

On 02/04/10 02:56, Jim Mercer wrote:
> "here, have some free guns. oh, by the way, its probably bad if you go
> around
> shooting people, so don't do that."
>
> it is starting too look to me like google is quite happy to host spammers.
>
> or, at best, doesn't care if spammers use them to host their services.

fw at deneb

Feb 4, 2010, 1:56 AM

Post #7 of 10 (1200 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

* David Ford:

> I feel fairly sure in saying that most mailing list software, newsgroup
> software, and communication software in general, will allow you to
> preemptively add people to your address book, subscription lists, etc.

But most injection points are blacklisted quickly when this happens.

tvarriale at comcast

Feb 4, 2010, 3:35 PM

Post #8 of 10 (1167 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Mercer" <jim [at] reptiles>
To: <nanog [at] nanog>
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2010 12:07 AM
Subject: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging
spammers?

>
> we have recently started getting alot of spam, out of dubai, from
> "ecampaigners.dxb [at] gmail"
>
> all of the spam comes from/through google and google groups.
>
> is this accepted/supported activity on google?
>
> if not, where might i find a contact who can cluefully respond?
>
> --
> Jim Mercer jim [at] reptiles +92 336 520-4504
> "I'm Prime Minister of Canada, I live here and I'm going to take a leak."
> - Lester Pearson in 1967, during a meeting between himself and
> President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had taken over
> Pearson's cottage retreat. At one point, a Johnson guard asked
> Pearson, "Who are you and where are you going?"
>

Not that I can point you in the correct direction, but Google Groups is a
haven for spammers. In fact, I stopped using it a while ago for this
reason.

I do find it odd that gmail is very good at filtering spam, but groups
isn't/doesn't.

tv

jim at reptiles

Feb 4, 2010, 8:32 PM

Post #9 of 10 (1154 views)
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Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 05:35:23PM -0600, Tony Varriale wrote:
> From: "Jim Mercer" <jim [at] reptiles>
> >we have recently started getting alot of spam, out of dubai, from
> >"ecampaigners.dxb [at] gmail"
> >
> >all of the spam comes from/through google and google groups.
>
> Not that I can point you in the correct direction, but Google Groups is a
> haven for spammers. In fact, I stopped using it a while ago for this
> reason.

the issue for me is not that they are spamming groups within google groups,
but that they are signing up the victim email addresses as members of the
group, then using google groups to distribute the content.

--
Jim Mercer jim [at] reptiles +92 336 520-4504
"I'm Prime Minister of Canada, I live here and I'm going to take a leak."
- Lester Pearson in 1967, during a meeting between himself and
President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had taken over
Pearson's cottage retreat. At one point, a Johnson guard asked
Pearson, "Who are you and where are you going?"

hearn at google

Feb 6, 2010, 8:38 AM

Post #10 of 10 (1090 views)
Permalink

Re: google contact? why is google hosting/supporting/encouraging spammers? [In reply to]

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

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