Hello nanog, I was pointed to the recent thread about Google Groups spammers and thought I'd throw out a few comments. Keeping Google free of spam, and keeping the wider internet community on our side is important to us.
By the time I looked at it, the account named by Jim was already shut down as part of a systematic anti-abuse sweep. We automatically identify and shut down many accounts every day and this account was no different. The nature of providing free email services at scale is that abuse is inevitable and the only way to tackle it is with automation, so hopefully you can understand that we may not always be as responsive to ad hoc manual reports as would be ideal. Google Groups spam specifically is something we started seriously tackling only recently. Doing it as well as GMail required a rewrite of the rather old groups backend. It's already improved dramatically in the past few months and it is continuing to get better rapidly as we close the remaining holes. On the question of caring, we do care about spam of all kinds, both inbound and outbound, and have a large anti abuse team dedicated to stopping spammers. This is a difficult problem - there is a dedicated underground economy of people who spend all day reverse engineering our systems so they can sell accounts and mail relay services to other, less capable individuals. But I think it's fair to say we're ahead of the game here - for example, Google is the only major webmail provider I know of that has aggressively deployed SMS verification. Thanks for the feedback. Google wants to be the best netizen possible, and we know getting spam from google IPs is frustrating - we're on it. /mike -- GMail Engineering Google Switzerland GmbH
