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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
Did you seriously just post an unsolicited commercial message in a thread about how unsolicited commercial messages are watering down legitimate communication mediums?
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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.
Then you haven't used Exchange, etc.
Exchange trumps Gmail easily. No Contest.
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What can i say, Google gives me 7 gigs of space for my account, the most popular local ISP gives 100 megs, and this crappy service. Actually gmail is the only email client i've dealt with recently that isn't hell and a half to support. the anti spam service has been near perfect until now as well on all 3 of my accounts. :D
And saying thats its a budget service is just plain uneducated. its funded (quite generously, I might add) by the discreet, context sensitive ads you will find on the side of the page, as opposed to part of your internet subscription.
I have yet to see Exchange work well in any environment over a few dozen people; certainly not without investing large amounts of money on duplicate servers and hardware. Included is my favourite Exchange analogy: If the same method that exchange/outlook uses to store email were used in the real world as a paper filing system: Every document is translated into Greek, and the original is burned. Then they are all glued together into one solid block and stuffed into a magic box with a tiny slot, through which you can talk to a little gnome who somehow gets each message for you as needed. Sometimes the gnome gets confused and it takes hours (sometimes days) for him to sort things out; meanwhile he can't find your documents until he is totally finished becoming unconfused again. As an added bonus the gnome costs several thousand dollars and when he dies every few years you need to buy a new gnome. Oh and if the first box gets (arbitrarily) full you have to buy another special gnomebox, which of course costs $$$
I think the safest thing they can do right now is return to their invitation only registration in an effort to close the breach. Then they have to start deleting spam accounts quickly before the spammers adapt to inviting themselves. If they are lucky they will be able to delete spam accounts faster than they multiply.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
And YOU definitely haven't used Gmail, which trumps Lotus Notes by a large margin... Oh, wait...
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.
And you certainly haven't used a telegraph. I only get spam about once every month or so, and I can usually ignore it by about the 15th beep or so.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
welcome to spamtrap@donotreply.com (just kidding, but donotreply.com gets a lot of interesting e-mail, I just wondered what they'd do if they started getting 'spamtrap' addressed mail)
well, making special spamtrap e-mail addresses and putting them in the clear on usenet, message boards, or even on social networking sites owned by google, and making sure the content is boring drivel no one would e-mail that person about. well, i mean how could you decide how to make boring drivel that would still put their address out on sites? 'first post' messages?
wouldn't someone notice that google got 'first post' every time on 123 consecutive front page articles? wouldn't they? though and e-mail them a congratulation and get spam busted?
i mean i know i can post boring irrelevant information, but i can't guarantee that if an e-mail is tied to that identity that someone won't e-mail me....
so spam traps are harder to implement than one would think, unless they're in 'hidden' code. EG: you go to a website, the e-mail is in the html, but never shows on the page... and if you do that, then they might make a scanner that nullifies those addresses... once the realize what's happening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
Expect to see a technological solution, this isn't a company full of middle managers or people who are used to losing technical battles.
If I were a betting man I'd say Google will either A) release a new authentication/authorization scheme for creating new accounts, or B) they'll evolve their current system to be resistant to delivering false negatives on bot provided responses.
Because honestly, isn't this just graphical/visual acuity based Turing test that needs to be treated as "passed" by the industry? The reasoning being: the equivalent of Alicebot now exists for the graphical world, so the test needs to be re-engineered to test another (currently) unpassed Turing style evaluation.
Based on that realization: the whole reason capcha's are stupid is that if you keep the existing design but try and make it "harder" to break, the designer of the Bot need only account for that change and not an entire redesign.
All this sounds like a great technical challenge: think up a new Turing test... When in reality those posting go back to invite only are absolutely right but it's likely we won't see that come out of Google.
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.