Google suspend email accounts that get lots of spam reports. It happens a couple of times a year for salespeople in my company who use Gmass (a bulk email sending tool).
I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.
TheChaplain 58 minutes ago [-]
It seems weird that Google wouldn't have some kind of observability alert on outgoing email. 10k emails per week is a lot.
superfrank 18 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure it actually is. Free Gmail is limited to 500 emails a day, but Workspace accounts are allowed up to 2000, so this this spammer has to be using a Workspace account.
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
compounding_it 28 minutes ago [-]
What if someone (Google) used Google suite to send 10k emails to fire people. Wouldn’t that be considered normal for the server for a day let alone a week. Yes I know I could have come up with a better example.
blitzar 10 minutes ago [-]
ye olde corporate reply to all bomb .. no more emails this week everyone, we have used up our quota
gambiting 14 minutes ago [-]
Those would be internal so I'm not sure they'd even count against your quota.
tjpnz 50 minutes ago [-]
Spammer must be a whale spending untold amounts on other Google services.
noobermin 1 hours ago [-]
It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only provider and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.
subroutine 44 minutes ago [-]
Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?
robot-wrangler 2 minutes ago [-]
> How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. the constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota is pretty damn villainous
nomel 40 minutes ago [-]
I don't know if it's that simple. As a litmus test, try to set up your own mail server. See how many milliseconds it takes for it to be blacklisted by gmail. And then observe the response time for their support, when you try to clear up the confusion that google has about your intentions.
27 minutes ago [-]
oivey 24 minutes ago [-]
It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.
unmole 54 minutes ago [-]
> get money for free
How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
noobermin 46 minutes ago [-]
A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.
unmole 25 minutes ago [-]
Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
noobermin 17 minutes ago [-]
It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
ranger_danger 9 minutes ago [-]
> You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
protocolture 40 minutes ago [-]
They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
25 minutes ago [-]
mindslight 21 minutes ago [-]
Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.
protocolture 4 minutes ago [-]
But theres not even that going on.
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
ranger_danger 52 minutes ago [-]
Advertising and eyeballs, I'd assume
bmandale 36 minutes ago [-]
>How do they get money for free?
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above
unmole 30 minutes ago [-]
Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?
darkwater 18 minutes ago [-]
No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.
SilverElfin 2 hours ago [-]
Good luck. These big tech companies have no incentive to care about support or really anything that isn’t tied directly to making money. And unless you have a friend there, Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.
ranger_danger 59 minutes ago [-]
I think there are lots of people that will see this story that either work at google or know someone who does, and I bet it will lead to their issue getting fixed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
throwaway27448 57 minutes ago [-]
It would help if they provided literally any way for a squeaky wheel to squeak at them aside from squeaking at the employees with a modicum of dignity (if they still exist)
snickerbockers 41 minutes ago [-]
Based on how much zendesk spam there is i doubt it.
rockskon 1 hours ago [-]
Cynicism helps no one.
throwuxiytayq 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should try getting a paid Google Workspace subscription /s
tjpnz 45 minutes ago [-]
This is a plausible explanation based on the amount of fraud tolerated in other parts of their business. But it's probably going to cost you more than one Workspace subscription.
Rendered at 06:27:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. the constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota is pretty damn villainous
How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above