---- 2009-11-03 I finally had to block all of Google. This is the tale. Updates to this file will be appended to the end. Back when Google first got into doing email, various people, including me, pointed out to them that their practice of hiding the sending host's IP was an abuse magnet. They bulled ahead with it anyway; I blocked mail exhibiting spoor of that particular mistake. Gmail webmail users were unable to reach me directly. Unfortunately, most of the net considered them too big to block, even though big sites should be held to _stricter_, not _laxer_, standards of behaviour. Some years passed. Then, in March 2009, I was forcibly subscribed to three Google Groups. I never got loop-closure mail from them; I had no idea it had happened until the mail started flowing. I was, and am, uninterested in all of them; one of them even appeared to be entirely in an alphabet, never mind language, I can't read. (In case anyone cares, the groups in question were IBroadCast-UAE, khaldeen, and roohaani; on 2009-05-01, xnonx joined them.) I complained to Google's abuse-reporting addresses, as looked up at abuse.net. Three times. At one-business-day intervals. The mail kept flowing despite that. Well, we know what we call organizations that subscribe people to mailing lists without the victims' consent and then ignore complaints - "spammers". But I gave them another chance. I looked at the mail and noticed it all had a header X-Google-Loop: groups so I blocked anything with that header. This block went up 2009-03-17. Since then, until today, I've been blocking 100% of this spam. Despite this, as recently as 2009-10-30, they were still trying to send this crap to me and getting rejected; apparently Google Groups not only lets people get subscribed without their knowledge, not only ignores abuse reports when this is done, they don't even have working bounce processing! It's actually possible I got bounce-processed off some of the lists. Here, for each list, is the first message date, last message date, and message count. As you can see, two of them are still going: khaldeen 2009-03-18 2009-05-30 336 IBroadcast-UAE 2009-03-19 2009-10-29 108 roohaani 2009-03-19 2009-09-20 18 xnonx 2009-05-01 2009-10-30 112 Today, 2009-11-03, two messages from ibroadcast-uae made it through to my main mailbox. Apparently Google has stopped flagging their spam with the header that let me identify it. (Interestingly, it was ibroadcast-uae, whereas the past mail has said IBroadcast-UAE.) I probably could change to blocking based on some other signature, but my patience with them has finally run out. I've given them lots of chances and they have repeatedly shown themselves unworthy of them; at this point, I believe that if I were to do less than throw up a blanket block against the entire organization, they would morph as necessary to evade it. That is to say, they're behaving like any other spammer. - Subscribing people to lists without consent. - Ignoring abuse reports. - No bounce processing. - Morphing to avoid blocks. So I'm now treating them like any other spammer. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ---- 2010-01-12 Despite a blanket block against all of Google for over two months, they are still hammering on me. Here's a list of days with counts of google.com rejections. (Initial high counts would not surprise me. Not taking the hint - barely even tapering off, and that might even be just Christmas break - after over two months erases any remaining doubt whether they deserve to be called spammers.) 51 2009-11-06 81 2009-11-07 59 2009-11-08 53 2009-11-09 33 2009-11-10 35 2009-11-11 35 2009-11-12 128 2009-11-13 96 2009-11-14 63 2009-11-15 37 2009-11-16 77 2009-11-17 27 2009-11-18 38 2009-11-19 87 2009-11-20 61 2009-11-21 50 2009-11-22 42 2009-11-23 22 2009-11-24 97 2009-11-25 89 2009-11-26 115 2009-11-27 48 2009-11-28 40 2009-11-29 65 2009-11-30 45 2009-12-01 33 2009-12-02 23 2009-12-03 103 2009-12-04 51 2009-12-05 37 2009-12-06 67 2009-12-07 17 2009-12-08 26 2009-12-09 27 2009-12-10 16 2009-12-11 67 2009-12-12 21 2009-12-13 34 2009-12-14 10 2009-12-15 26 2009-12-16 30 2009-12-17 55 2009-12-18 40 2009-12-19 15 2009-12-20 18 2009-12-21 31 2009-12-22 9 2009-12-23 50 2009-12-24 82 2009-12-25 55 2009-12-26 18 2009-12-27 39 2009-12-28 6 2009-12-29 36 2009-12-30 61 2009-12-31 72 2010-01-01 53 2010-01-02 29 2010-01-03 16 2010-01-04 21 2010-01-05 17 2010-01-06 33 2010-01-07 100 2010-01-08 81 2010-01-09 10 2010-01-10 35 2010-01-11 Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of the two-day gap before the pounding started - the first hit on this block was 2009-11-06 12:20:43. I'd be intersted in any theories anyone has for that. ---- 2012-05-06 Someone who works for Google tells me, on IRC, that Groups has been unstaffed for years. This actually - assuming, of course, that it's true - makes my opinion of them worse. It explains, certainly, but it doesn't excuse; leaving an abuse magnet like that running without anyone to keep a lid on abuse through it is grossly irresponsible even for a small site (the phrase I've seen is "attractive nuisance"). For someone Google's size it's even worse; when you're the 800lb gorilla in the room, you need to be extra-careful to make sure you don't cause damage - an attractive nuisance with the sort of resources Google had to put behind Groups is a disaster waiting to happen. Not that this is the first time Google has had what looks superficially like a good idea and run with it without (apparently) applying even minimal thought; look at Streetview, or Buzz, or probably various others I'd know about if I had anything to do with Google. If anything, that makes it worse, in that it demonstrates they are incapable of learning (or, worse, unwilling to learn) from their past mistakes. ---- 2013-02-08 I just got mail from a Google Group today. They apparently have started morphing not only their in-mail signatures, but their friggin' sending domains; the mail came from a 1e100.net host. This also evidences their utter lack of bounce processing. The mail came from the lojban-beginners list. I subscribed to that list, but it was long enough ago that I don't even recall whether it was before Google misbehaved badly enough to provoke me to block them or whether I subscribed to the list when it was hosted elsewhere and got moved over when they moved the list. It certainly has been multiple years that they should have been bounce-processing me off the list. Multiple YEARS! ---- 2013-10-20 A friend who is a Google customer in a more traditional sense (ie, buying something other than advertising eyeballs from them) looked into this and tells me it appears that "the issue [I] reported was fixed in 2011"; apparently the issue referred to is that Group admins could force-subscribe people to groups. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm glad they finally fixed it, certainly, but that they set it up wrong - something any competent email admin would have known would be an abuse magnet - is disturbing; that it took them two years to fix it I have trouble calling anything less than catastrophic incompetence, *especially* for someone Google's size. That they apparently didn't fix anything else at the time (see the previous update, of 2013-02-08, more than a year after that 2011 fix) is even more disturbing. I can't believe Google doesn't have competent email admins; you can't run a mailer that big and have it even kinda-sorta-mostly work without some serious competence. But the rest of the organization is doing a very good job of keeping that competence hidden when it comes to, oh, say, handling abuse reports. Or even implementing rudimentary bounce processing. ---- 2013-10-30 It also occurs to me that that it took my friend the customer to get any response out of Google on this matter is another problem. That they're willing to impose the costs of their irresponsibility on everyone who's not a direct customer is further reason (as if it were needed!) to refuse to listen to their s(p)ewage.