1 Jan
2021
1 Jan
'21
12:14 p.m.
Hi Peter,
About two minutes of searching lead to this:
https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse. The keywords were "gmail
report spam abuse", which led me to a page that was centered on
organizations using Gmail as their backend and how to file a report against
them that Google will handle. However, the top link of the page was "Need
to report abuse? Please see our Reporting Abuse Incidents page.", which was
a link to a general abuse form to fill out for any Google product including
Gmail.
I selected the product (Gmail), selected "Report an abusive Gmail account"
and that led to "https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse", which has
the form you want to use to report the owner of that Gmail account. There
are enough fields on that form to make your specific abuse report, and
there are plenty of free form entry areas so you can explain how this has
been going on for years.
I'm not sure if you have seen that form or tried this process before.
Clearly what "check212014 at gmail.com" is wrong and is an abuse of the
service. Please try it out.
-Mike
On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 6:15 AM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hi Mike,
Thanks for chiming in on this.
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google ...
Large corporations (Google included) are
basically a scaling problem,
especially when it comes to customer service. I think that's pretty
obvious, and stories about YouTube problems and account access are
legion.
I don't have a solution that can be applied
to the problems on this
thread. My purpose in posting was to point out that this probably isn't
a
matter of market share or people forgetting not
to be evil; it's a
technical problem. Getting the configs right is the first step.
Blacklists are also a problem, and clearly sometimes the filters being
applied are wrong. We try to find and fix these things as they are
brought
to our attention.
The big problem is bringing it to Google's attention.
It took me less than a minute of searching to find this:
https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send_new
That's the form to contact the Gmail team for getting help with debugging
your mail being marked as spam/phishing attempts, you get SMTP temp-fails
or rejects, or other problems. (The search term was "problems sending
email to gmail accounts" - go to the first link, follow the workflow, and
assuming all of the preliminary answers to the questions are "I didn't do
anything wrong" then you'll get a link to that contact form.)
I spent hours over days looking for something like this (using Google
searches) and I failed to find it. I always ended up in blind alleys
that assumed I was a Google customer trying to get an email into my
mailbox,
not a correspondant of a Google customer trying to get an email out.
My issue with Google and evil is that they provide no way that I can find
to bring abuse of Google facilites (to send spam for example) to their
attention so that the abuse can be stopped. For example, someone has been
testing my mail server to see if it can be used to relay spam by forging
emails as coming from various email addresses in my domain name and
addressed
to check212014 at gmail.com and attempting to feed these emails into my mail
server (which doesn't accept them) from compromised ip addresses. This has
happened nearly two hundred times over a period of five years now. I have
made numerous attempts to bring this to the attention of Google so that
they
could put a stop to this check212014 mailbox being used for this abusive
purpose yet I have failed. You seem to have the magic touch. Can you let
me
know how to bring this to Google's attention?
(By the way, this doesn't tend to happen with hotmail.com addresses to
pick one
example. The reason it doesn't is because on the rare occasions when it
does,
reporting the issue to hotmail or whoever using the standard, easy to find
abuse reporting mechanisms results in the problem being stopped and the
spammer soon gets fed up having to set up new testing mailboxes every few
days so they end up moving over to gmail.com instead where they can keep
the
same relay testing mailbox for at least 5 years.)
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
Mike