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Some Anti-Spam Vendors Blocking and Slowing Gmail
fiorenza writes "Google's Gmail (and corporate mail) are being throttled and sometimes blocked by some anti-spam services, including MessageLabs and Antigen. Ars Technica reports that the blocking is a result of the Google CAPTCHA crack, which has allowed a deluge of spam from Gmail's clusters. Most users won't get blocked mail, but Ars confirmed with MessageLabs that Gmail delivery delays are to be expected."
With the current state of the world economy, no one will be willing to pay for something that they get used for free.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
Umm... I have used a number of commercial email systems (in-house for major companies and institutions) and none of them could provide a service that was even remotely close to what Gmail does for free.
There were number of times where my emails are silently deleted from Hotmail or even gmail, so hey. Welcome to the world of screwed up SMTP protocol. And all thanks to spammers.
/dev/null. Want to filter spam? Reply with 5xx codes instead - not accept with 2xx and then bin it (unless mailing list headers found in mail, there you can drop spam)
Today email is less reliable message delivery medium than regular mail which is quite sad considering all transactions in SMTP were considered to be, well, transactions. An acceptance of email by destination means it is delivered, not going to
I am not sure what Google can do to crack down on this abuse, but they really need to. Have there been any improvement to their Captcha system since it was compromised? Are they closing down suspect accounts?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The missing part of this story really is that Google`s Gmail client has very effective anti-spam filtering. I can see why companies who earn their keep protecting typical client-side email systems, would want to make Gmail obsolete or ineffective. Spammers might use Gmail as a tool to spam, but with good filtering it really doesn`t cost that much compared to the loss of time spent weeding out ham from spam.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't necessarily believe these free services are inherently low quality. What is true is that they are a massive target for spammers. Spammers get something from these services they don't get by sending mail directly by SMTP: DKIM and SPF authentication from (relatively) high reputation IPs.
Yes, they all go around blocking each other sometimes, but this is not new. I vaguely remember complaints about Gmail being blocked by Yahoo (or was it the other way around) a couple of years ago.
Q: How do you keep the majority of the spammers away?
A: Attach a price-tag.
Regards,
Website Hosting
Wow, if you're having that many problems with Exchange, your sysadmins need to do a better job. Exchange is generally a pretty good mail/groupware server for corporate environments. If you throw an Exchange server together in five minutes, then yeah, you might have some problems, but as long as you think it through beforehand (and like with anything computer related, have a good backup strategy) it should work pretty well unless you have some really unusual requirements.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Gmail should go back to their old scheme, where you had to have a cell phone to receive your password, and you could only have one gmail account per phone. That would slow the spammers down.
If you don't have a phone, you're probably not a good candidate for an advertiser-supported service anyway.
...to be safe from spammers using Google Mail... people should just -get- Google Mail themselves?
I don't know whether to just blink or to think that you discovered a Google strategy here; getting even more people over to Google Mail because there's less spam there; nevermind the fact that a portion of that spam is sent from their own servers(!) I suppose there wouldn't be a heck of a lot of incentive to do something about the spam accounts, then.
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Or maybe you're saying that Google should apply their spam filters for incoming mail to all outbound mail as well. That sounds a lot more sane anyway.
If a legit message is flagged as possible spam, ask for user input (make sure this can't be automated too easily) on whether it's actually legit or not.
Regardless of that response, if N messages in t time are flagged, have an engineer (okay, school kid) check it out and disable the account if necessary
Blame the companies that allowed the idiots who buy from spammers to get internet in the first place. I know: everyone makes mistakes. At 2 AM, even I've clicked on a banner once or twice to find something (although I can never recall joining a site due to advertisement via mass mailing).
But, sadly, statistics still prove that if you try to hit 1,000,000 people without any true risk of getting caught, your bound to hit a sucker eventually. There's one born every minute, after all. Not to use colloquial phrases as my source, of course.
Personally I'm disheartened that American spam has lowered so. It makes it much harder to track down the parent company and call them and ask them why they sent you their e-mail in the first place...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
It's funny how a good backup strategy involves NOT using anything from Microsoft to backup exchange. I mean seriously, how long has been exchange been out and Microsoft can't make a backup program that can backup and restore individual mailboxes? WTF! Oh, and I don't want to take the store offline to do it.
That is *completely* incorrect. In Exchange 2003 prior to SP2, the limit for the mailbox store was 16 GB. In SP2 they upped that limit to 75 GB, which really is probably enough for most of the small organizations that probably just have a single server running Exchange Standard.
Here is a document about it, scroll down to the part where it says Licensed Database Size Limit. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998066.aspx
In Exchange 2007, Standard Edition can have up to five mailbox stores in each of five storage groups. And there is no limit on size. http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2007-Store-Related-Changes-Improvements.html
Its also mentioned on the Microsoft Exchange page on wikipedia.
I'm not saying that Exchange is a perfect mailserver for (or worth the cost in) every situation, or denying that Microsoft does some really annoying things, but please try to get your facts straight before you complain about a piece of software.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
>Exchange trumps Gmail easily. No Contest.
As a source for spam, and a plague of server-generated 'automated' notices, Exchange beats EVERYTHING.
Exchange is fine if you keep it where it belongs: inside a workgroup or protected by a SMTP-protocol filter (which is not running on the same box).
Recently I had to defend a customer who was the target of a DDOS... 80% of which were "bounces" from Exchange (forged From: undeliverables, permanent Out Of Office, DSNs, Mailbox full emails, etc). Exchange is pathetic in terms of controlling what gets "onto" the server.
By comparison, Google mail is a VERY good Internet citizen. They may have had Captcha compromised, but they'll plug it up. I'll them over their competition anyday.
Gmail should go back to their old scheme, where you had to have a cell phone to receive your password... If you don't have a phone, you're probably not a good candidate for an advertiser-supported service anyway.
Since when does cell phone == phone? Tons of people don't have cell phones, and most of them are consumers of various goods just like people who do have cell phones. It's amazing how the 'net culture makes it easy to write off huge swaths of the population just because they don't have or want the latest gadgets.
While the 2GB size was erroneous, it is true that 2003 Standard is limited to a single mail store (see the article you linked to; it says as much). So prior to SP2 you were stuck with 16GB total size.
I find it typical that you start mentioning Exchange 2007; pretty much every Microsoft person recommended we upgrade to the newest software when we started having trouble with our Exchange server. Luckily we decided to get off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill; it was a pretty easy sell when we saw how much just the software alone cost.
What a bunch of incompetents. 12 day old backups for one, and a complete inability to open task manager to discover which process was doing all the disk writes.
If it was exchange itself, a mail loop was probably the cause. Older Exchange versions didn't totally prevent users from creating ping-pong forwarding rules with certain external mail systems. Again, a few minutes with simple tools like perfmon would have diagnosed the issue.
Give the same "admins" a Linux box and the same amount of training they had for Windows/Exchange, and the damage would inevitably be just as bad.
Management is the key in any IT system - we run Exchange and other Windows-based stuff with four-nines reliability. It is possible, and not even that hard with good controls and processes. The same can be said of just about any modern OS, and even most application stacks (although there is some truly horrible, unworkable crap out there in the vertical markets).