Slashdot Mirror
Google Mail Servers Enable Backscatter Spam
Mike Morris writes "Google email servers are responsible for a large volume of backscatter spam. No recipient validation is being performed for the domains googlegroups.com and blogger.com — possibly for other Google domains as well, but these two have been confirmed. (You can test this by sending an email to a bogus address in either of the domains; you'll quickly get a Google-generated bounce message.) Consequently spammers are able to launch dictionary attacks against these domains using forged envelope sender addresses. The owners of these forged addresses are then inundated with the bounce messages generated by the Google mail servers. The proper behavior would be for the mail servers to reject email traffic to non-existent users during the initial SMTP transaction. Attempts at contacting them via abuse@google.com and postmaster@google.com have gone unanswered for quite some time. Only automated responses are received which say Google isn't doing anything wrong."
Did you have an active session with gmail going at the time? As in, you didn't click "log out"?
You're being either overly literal, or trying to create a distinction where there isn't much of one.
No, the responses don't contain an original message, nor are they commercial or anything like that, but the spammy thing about this form of backscatter is about the VOLUME and indiscriminate nature of the mail, not the content.
This isn't being blown out of proportion at all. It's nothing like a mailing list sending a confirmation. No spammer is going to send a million messages with different forged addresses to a single email address (the subscribe address) -- that defeats the whole purpose of spamming, which is to contact DIFFERENT addresses!
What google has done is open a wildcard on some domains so that anyone launching a dictionary attack on googlegroups.com will send a million messages TO a million different addresses FROM a million different forged addresses. Google then sends a million bounces back to a million different addresses, and if you run a domain that the spammer used as their "from", you suddenly get tens or hundreds of thousands of identical bounce messages from Google. THAT is backscatter spam -- thousands of useless messages sent to forged addresses on your domain, regardless of content. And no mail server in 2008, much less one run by a major tech company, should make that possible.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Yeah, Facebook actually asks for your gmail password, so do other sites. A bit shady, but I trust those sites not to store it because there'd be hell to pay if anyone found out otherwise.
All your base are belong to Wii.