Google rejecting mail due to bad domain reputation

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paulej
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Joined: Sun Aug 23, 2009 7:32 pm
Location: Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
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Google rejecting mail due to bad domain reputation

Post by paulej »

Folks,

Packetizer has existed now nearly 20 years. It's hard to believe, but next month marks the 20 year old mark! During those years, we've run Google Adsense ads to help support our community-oriented web site. We've been in touch with folks at Google. We're very much known to Google. They probably know more about us than we do ourselves.

Also over those years, we've battled spam endlessly. A large portion of the spam we've received over the years has been sent to us via Google's servers (mostly Gmail abusers). We take that abuse and filter it as best we can. Much of it does get filtered out, but some does still end up in mailboxes.

Given our long history with Google and Google's position as one of the biggest spam sources on the Internet, you'd think they might be somewhat forgiving when one of our users screws up. Nope. No such luck.

Sadly, one of our users had her email password stolen. Spammers took full advantage of her email account to send at least 38,000 email messages through our mail server over the course of a few hours before it was detected and stopped. Once detected, we immediately addressed the problem. No more spam. We hate spam. But, too late. Google's system decided that, due to that occurrence of spam (at the hands of people flagrantly violating the law), our domain was to be listed as having a bad reputation. Gmail users can still send us spam, of course, but we cannot even reply to individuals using gmail if they have a question.

There appears to be absolutely nothing we can do about it, either.

And so we've decided that two can play this game. We're just going to block mail from Gmail (and anyone sending through Google's servers) to our support address and selected other addresses since we can't even reply, anyway. After all, it's better to inform senders that they aren't getting a reply than to leave them wondering!

It's truly sad when a giant like Google can wield so much power. It's even worse when it's abused.

Paul

PS - The new Microsoft Edge browser is out! Go get it.
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