Re: Worsening google service reputation and abuse

[Barry Shein via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

One of my staff once suggested we have a "Spam Appreciation Day", shut
off all the filters for 24 hours to give customers an idea of what's
really going on.

Amusing, it had practical problems like no doubt many customers
mailboxes would just fall over dead (e.g., out of quota, become
totally unmanageable by them.)

I still maintain a solution to most spam lies in the economic and
business realm, not the technical realm of layering on yet another
filter tho even an economic approach would require some sort of
technical enforcement tho very different in nature.

But as the old expression goes: When all you have is a hammer the
whole world looks like a nail.

On August 15, 2025 at 10:54 nanog () lists nanog org (Tom Beecher via NANOG) wrote:
> Yeah, it's a bit much to assert that G "wants" things this way. It's kind
> of a big FU to the people who do work on this stuff full time.
>
> Heard the same thing about Y for years, how we 'support spammers' , how we
> 'don't care', and 'never did anything'. All the while our anti-spam teams
> came up with absurdly genius ways to handle these problems that only people
> in that space ever knew about. The amount of shit spam that people don't
> see is many, many orders of magnitude more than what gets through.
>
> Email spam has been a problem for more than 30 years at this point. The
> fact that a ton of really smart people have worked on this for that long,
> and it's still an issue, should be a huge indicator that it's a complex
> issue with no easy solutions.
>
> Could Y have done many things better? Sure. Could Google be doing many
> things better? Sure. Nobody is perfect. Can we ask them to be better? Yes,
> we should.
>
> But assertions that companies *WANT* these problems to exist is , honestly,
> pretty damn ignorant.
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 10:27 AM Jared Mauch via NANOG <
> nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 12:23:26PM -0400, Christopher Morrow via NANOG
> > wrote:
> > > On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 11:16 AM Marco Moock via NANOG
> > > <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> > > > On 14.08.2025 10:41 Jared Mauch via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
> > wrote:
> > > > > Is there anyone at Google that is able to address the ongoing
> > > > > abuse problems that are coming out of your services like classroom,
> > > > > groups and otherwise?
> > >
> > > (with the caveat that i don't know anything about classroom, or groups
> > > really, but had walked down
> > > this path with reader back-when)
> > >
> > > The problem(s) from jared's original mail SOUND like a broken thing in
> > > some services
> > > that PROBABLY tried to provide protections, those either  missed the
> > > mark or work broken along
> > > some timeline... and maybe need some attention to fix/course-correct.
> >
> >         yeah, i think there's a subtle thing here where the expectation
> > is that someone will be willing to opt-in or add *all* the addresses
> > that may end up in their mailbox, while i as postmaster need some way to
> > say "hey these well-formatted list-like things maybe shouldn't be put on
> > lists/groups/whatnot on your side"
> >
> > > > It is a well know issue of a company named Google that supports
> > > > spammers.
> > > >
> > > > It took months months until they switched of Google Groups Newsgroups
> > > > It was being flooded with millions of spam posts and nobody took
> > action.
> > > > Google wants it that way.
> > >
> > > I don't think this is accurate.
> >
> >         I agree, hence the note, but I think there's an element of this
> > is a weird corner case that needs some [minor] attention to improve
> > things.
> >
> >         I may one day need access to google classroom, but not in the
> > role/nature that I'm getting the mails today, and I don't want to toss
> > all of google to /dev/null.
> >
> >         This also isn't quite a google only problem, I see the same
> > thing from outlook/o365/hotmail but to a lesser extent.  YMMV.
> >
> >         - Jared
> >
> >
> > --
> > Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared () puck nether net
> > clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only
> > mine.
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-- 
        -Barry Shein

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