Posted by pabs3 18 hours ago
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
Just imagine a weekly newsletter with 100k subscribers.
Above that threshold you should use tools like moosend, benchmarkemail, or similar. And they ask a pretty penny when you reach that scale.
Google Workspace email is very generous with the kind of outgoing email you can send via their SMTP servers.
I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them
Have reported AppSheet to FCC after seeing Google wasn't doing enough--same scam email format, same inbox-landing pathway, but still irked.
Also try forwarding the emails to the phishing emails of the misrepresented brands, when they have an address for it. Figure they're the ones who have any power.
I always report them with suggestions they teach their AI that invoices sent to large number of addresses are phishing.
This is starting to become important as countries (very unwisely!) start tying things like national ID and banking to smartphones.
But when a moderately technical colleague wanted to do the same, I told her to use Mox, she set it up and Gmail doesn't block her either.
So... would you please elaborate?
It was dead-nuts simple in the 1990s: Just learn enough about DNS to put in an MX record that points to an A record, get sendmail working, and have it begin delivering mail. The end. (Open relay? No spam filter? No virus scanning? No nothin'? Yeah, that kind of was the style at the time...)
It's got a lot more steps today, but it's still do-able. Operationally, keeping a mail server online and treated well just takes one or two people to spend a little bit of time occasionally to stay proactively ahead of new expectations and requirements instead of reacting to them after things change.
It also helps if Carla, from marketing, doesn't wake up one day and decide to spam the entire customer list without asking for guidance first. Maybe I should have put some automatic mitigation into place for that, but whatever: We chatted about that and it never happened again.
(Or at least, I find that to be true with smaller companies. Bigger ones obviously may require more elaborate systems to handle more volume and/or provide better uptime. But the requirements of keeping the reputation up are about the same regardless of scale, and that still only takes one or two people to pay attention to things sometimes. [And the only reason two might be required is in case one of them gets hit by a bus.])
I am definitely not being flagged for any actual spam-like behavior. I might send out 40 e-mails a year, and even though it's a "family" domain, I'm the only one who has ever used it, ironically enough, as part of my decade-old effort to de-Google.
Fixing it was always pretty simple -- or at least, non-mysterious. They'd bounce some things, I'd look at the headers of the bounced messages, and therein were links to instructions there that showed how to resolve whatever issue it was this year.
Just follow the steps, implement the new thing, and stuff started flowing again in rather short order. Not so bad.
IIRC, the only time it ever cost us any money was when the RBLs started keeping track of dynamic IP pools and we needed to finally shift over to something actually-static.
AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.
Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.
It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).
Source: Used to work there.
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. those constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota are still villainous
How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491
> For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address.
> In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
MariaDB > SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(email, '@', -1) AS domain, COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM accounts GROUP BY domain HAVING domain != '' ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 10;
+-------------+-------+
| domain | cnt |
+-------------+-------+
| hotmail.com | 38015 |
| gmail.com | 16280 |
| yahoo.com | 4080 |
| o2.pl | 2321 |
| wp.pl | 2206 |
| live.com | 1415 |
| outlook.com | 814 |
| interia.pl | 609 |
| hotmail.es | 590 |
| live.se | 521 |
+-------------+-------+
10 rows in set (0.044 sec)Another way monopolies form is via exclusionary practices and the resulting impression that "things that aren't gmail are less reliable". (Anti-spam does not have to be exclusionary, and anti-spam is generally a good thing, but when it reliably sends smaller providers' mail to spam based solely on them being smaller providers, it is.)
Another way monopolies form is via social effects. "What's your gmail?", or people on first-tier technical support hearing you say an email address and assuming it's a gmail address and having to be corrected, and having never encountered one of those before.
Assuming any of those are "voluntary preference" is a take.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
One well-known rejection of the Borkian view is in Lina Khan "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" paper. https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
(I can't find a copy of that source online, but you can see the quote at https://archive.org/details/traderegulationc0005pito/mode/2u... where Pitofsky rejects viewing antitrust law through an exclusively economic lens.)
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
In the name of national security, of course.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above
It's not perfect though. For some reason, it doesn't find (or deliberately ignores) OVH hosts that are relaying spam.
One example: they seem to have a size limit of 50KB when you report a spam mail via their web form. I've received quite some spam that exceeds that because they use base64 encoding of the body, add non-visible filler content to drown out the actual spam/phishing message, etc.
SpamCop suggests to cut off the message and still process it but then they miss e.g. the link to the phishing website and thus they can't send out a report for that.
Speaking of phishing links: a lot of the phishing mails I receive, link to some account on storage.googleapis.com. I've seen mails with links to the same account for weeks on end before they switch to a different one, implying that these links remain online for a long time. You would think that marking such mails as phishing in GMail (they are already flagged as spam) would get them on some kind of radar but apparently not...
Are the real-time-blackhole lists still a thing?
If they're regularly allowing spam and not responding to reports in any sort of timely manner, possibly they should be reported to those.
Not going to work though, is it. Too big to fail shouldn't be a thing. It's not like you can't be flexible about it or give them some room to deal with it within corporate policy; but they do need to deal with it, right?
Realistically, I think some companies have outgrown the size where internet can still self-regulate them. You'd hurt yourself more than gmail.
This either needs laws or new game theory.
Or -you know- deprecate the current email system. I know that's a perennial proposal; but that's because every year it gets even more broken in even more interesting ways. It's patch-on-patch-on-patch at the moment. Just spinning up sendmail on a random box won't quite cut it anymore, if you want to participate.