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Some Anti-Spam Vendors Blocking and Slowing Gmail

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the need-something-more-dire-than-can-spam dept.

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."

9 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's ok though... by TheMeuge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Google wins by mfh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  3. Re:It's ok though... by CowboyNealOption · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 $$$

  4. Re:Gmail and others blocking legit domains, so hey by BagOBones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Really? Do you have any idea the resources this would take for some organizations?

    Based on stats from my frontend SPAM filters 80 - 90% of ALL mail receive in a day is SPAM.

    On my reports some individual users are targeted with between 1500 and 2000 SPAM messages a day. There storage quotas would probably be exceeded over night from SPAM alone.

    I would need to increase my storage capacity immensely if I allowed every spam message to get to the users Junk folder. Not to mention the extra bandwidth of allowing all those mail delivery connections to complete OR to send NDRs to forged senders that are going to bounce back at my system and cause even more load.

    --
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  5. Re:Crack down by Thelasko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Re:It's ok though... by cleatsupkeep · · Score: 5, Funny

    And YOU definitely haven't used Gmail, which trumps Lotus Notes by a large margin... Oh, wait...

  7. Re:They will, eventually, be cracked again. by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What they need to do is have a process for detecting when an account is spamming. Now, you and I would just say "when an account is sending 10,000 messages a day" and that would be correct for about 99.9% of the cases.
    No, that's the whole point of defeating captcha. Instead of sending 10,000 messages from 1 account, send 10 messages each from 1000 accounts.
  8. Re:It's ok though... by kitsunewarlock · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
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  9. Re:It's ok though... by imemyself · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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