Hello everyone, I'm the co-founder of improvmx.com, a service that lets people create custom domain aliases and forward everything to a redirection email.
Last weekend, we've identified a cohort of users that were abusing our system by creating accounts at scale, forging emails, and reporting hundreds of thousands of emails to spam. It seems that the attack was directed directly against the service with the aim to take it down or hurt deliverability. We have a lot of systems in place to catch those kinds of attacks, and so far it's been working well, but this time they definitely were able to do much more damage than what we've ever seen before. Looking at Gmail Postmaster Tool, we had a day with a spam rate reaching 30% (usually, this would be around 0.00 or 0.01) and obviously, Gmail lowered our reputation from "High" to "Bad" almost instantly. This is causing some forwarded emails to randomly soft or even hard bounce, depending on which IP from our range is picked. I completely understand why, and it was up to us to make the behavior stop, ban the users, and put extra checks in place to prevent it in the future (which we did), but we're now in a place where we can't service our thousands of legitimate users until reputation is coming back up. I've already explained the situation through Gmail's "bulk sender contact form <https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send_new>", but it's really unclear as to who's looking at this and whether or not they'll take any action. Some questions for the list: 1. Have any of you ever experienced something similar? 2. Should we just wait for our reputation to slowly get back up again, or are the IPs gone forever? 3. Is there any other way to get access to someone at Gmail? I struggled to find the bulk sender form, so maybe there is something else too. 4. Any tips to prevent that kind of spam/abuse report at scale? Thanks a lot for the help! Antoine
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