Intro
I have a pretty high regard for Google and their Gmail email service. They really seem to strive to keep its reputation sterling. But lately a persistent spam has been coming in to me from one of their users and no action is being taken, so I am beginning to wonder.
The details
It’s not that I don’t get spam from Gmail account holders. I do. That’s not shocking as I get hundreds of spam each day since my address is available from whois registrations on hundreds of domains, amongst other readily available sources.
How do I know it’s a real Gmail user and not someone spoofing the sender address? These two headers tell me:
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 209.85.160.44 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.85.160.44; Received: from mail-pb0-f44.google.com ([209.85.160.44]) (using TLSv1) by drjohnstechtalk.com, etc. |
In other words one of the received headers provided by a trusted server gives me the IP of the sending server (209.85.160.44), which is in Google’s directly allocated IP space.
This can be confirmed at arin.net.
The email itself looks like this:
From: "Tom Zhu" <[email protected]> Dear Sir/Madam, We are owner of your_domain.mx and Presently we would like to know if you have an interest in buying it. We are looking to sell this domain for 2,000 Euro. It has been listed on Sedo.com. You can buy it through the following link: https://sedo.com/search/details.php4?domain=your_domain.mx ... |
But instead of your_domain the email mentions a specific copyrighted domain name.
I’ve received it over 10 times from the same sender. The sender is a cybersquatter sending repeated, unsolicited spam. If that doesn’t constitute a violation of their Terms of Use then I don’t know what does. I’ve filed no fewer than five formal abuse complaints to Google over the course of the several months. The Gmail abuse link is in the references. But they keep coming in so I know Google has taken no action whatsoever. And of course I have never heard back from them.
I’ve filed lots of other abuse complaints about other Gmail senders as well, but those others seem to be one-off spams and I don’t get additional emails from them. Yes it takes time to fill out the abuse form, but I do it for the overall good of the Internet. We technical people have a responsibility to make our world better…
Conclusion
I am personally miffed and professionally concerned that Google Gmail may not be operating as clean a shop (white glove) as we all had thought. Here I’ve documented a specific case of documented abuse about which they have done nothing for months on end.
References
Gmail abuse link.
ARIN’s IP lookup service is here.
A detailed look at how enom has handled some spam/domain complaints is written up here.
My successful fight to conquer scads of Chinese language spam is documented here.