Emails going to spam folder in gmail

[Peter Coghlan]

> 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.
> 

Hi Mike,

I appreciate the trouble you are going to here.  I am prepared to accept
your suggestion in good faith.  However, I am not a big fan of filling in
webforms to report abuse.  It is a slow and tedious manual process to have
to engage with in comparison to the highly automated abuse I am attempting
to deal with.  It is difficult to create tools to make it easier for me and
less error prone for me to fill in webforms plus I don't easily get to keep
a copy of what I have put in the form for filing with the abuse reports I
make to other major email providers.  So, when I see further abuse of a
gmail.com account, I find it difficult to see whether I reported this
particular one previously or not and when.  I resent having to jump through
hoops to help Google do what they should be doing anyway.  Many other mail
providers are grateful for abuse reports received by whatever means is most
convenient to the reporter of the abuse.  They regard encouraging abuse
reports as a way of minimising the abuse they have to deal with because
their abusive customers tend to up sticks and go to another provider when
they are repeatedly stopped in their tracks.

I appreciate that you are the messenger here and I am trying not to shoot you.
It's just that you represent the only feedback most of us have ever got from
Google.

Anway, I went to https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse as you
suggested.  This form is clearly designed to report spam sent from a gmail.com
account, not a gmail.com account being used to receive the results of relay
testing.  The form has mandatory fields which require me to provide for
example "Email headers of the questionable message".  I don't have any
headers for any of the messages concerned because my mail server rejects
every one of them before the sender gets a chance to send headers as per
best practice for dealing with unauthorised relay attempts.  Even if I had
headers, they would not be from an email sent by a gmail.com account.  I am
betting that when this form finally gets to a real person in Google, it
will go straight in the bin because I wasn't able to provide email headers
that came from an email sent from a gmail.com account.  Nevertheless, I will
try it anyway, just to see what happens.

By the way,  I looked at the other link you suggested earlier for getting
mail through to Google: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send_new

It turns out I had come across this link before some time ago but had forgotten
about it.  I had formed the impression that this particular one was aimed at
commercial mailing list operators who are having difficulty getting their
(legitimate) mailshots through to gmail.com customers of theirs, advertising
that people have signed up for by ticking the "please send me information
about your product" box or the "please put me on your monthly newsletter" box
etc.  It does not appear it is designed to help out someone who is trying to
get an email through to their friend who has a gmail.com account.

I also took a look at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126 which you
suggested yesterday.  This is definately aimed at well funded commercial
senders of email that are sending out thousands of mailshots at a time, not
the person in the street who is trying to communicate with a friend or
someone with a shared interest.  Just look at the original title of the page!
It suggests I send messages that have different purposes from different ip
addresses for heavens sake. (I can do this but do you think I am going to?)

I apologise to my friends on cctalk for going on about this at such length
and I don't propose to waste any more of the mailing lists time on this.
(Unless everyone is actually sitting on the edge of their seats waiting
to know what happens next that is...)

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.


> 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
> > >
> >