Box of Meat

The Email Wars: Sweet so is Google a Spammer Now?

Dylan seems very excited about the tales of Google being used as a spam relay. Misplaced schadenfreude, perhaps?

I’ve been reading The Email Wars for some time, but for some reason he never rarely approves any of my comments. Here’s the comment I submitted this time (which he did approve, after all):

Sausage, an anonymous contributor to Box of Meat, had an interesting take on this study:

http://boxofmeat.net/post/34454023

For additional perspective, though, I should add that it’s overly simplistic to claim that ‘services such as Hotmail and Yahoo “trust” Gmail.’ Anyone doing reputation calculations will quickly see that you can’t hold ISPs & freemail providers to the exact same thresholds as email marketers: marketers control their entire mailstream, while ISPs have end users. ISPs will kick off end users who do bad things, while most marketers will keep sending until something external forces them to stop.

The thresholds for entirely unknown IPs tend to be even lower, because most of those are botnets sending the worst kinds of spam.

For years, spammers have been creating freemail accounts en masse and then sending through them to other ISPs & freemail providers. It can be difficult for the ISPs to control, because they don’t want to harm their real users.

I would strongly urge anyone in the email marketing industry to pay attention to spammers’ tactics, both to avoid acting like spammers and to understand why ISPs react in the ways they do.

J.D., currently the sole non-anonymous contributor to Box of Meat

13 May 2008
9:59

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