Google Launches Gmail Postmaster Tools To Eliminate Spam 55
Mark Wilson writes: Spam is a problem that is not going away for anyone who receives email — and who doesn't? Over the years Google has taken steps to try to reduce the amount of junk that reaches Gmail inboxes and today the company is taking things a step further with Gmail Postmaster Tools and enhanced filter training for Gmail. Part of the problem with spam — aside from the sheer volume of it — is that the detection of it is something of an art rather than a science. It is all too easy for legitimate email to get consigned to the junk folder, and this is what Gmail Postmaster Tools aims to help with. Rather than helping recipients banish spam, it helps senders ensure that their messages are delivered to inboxes rather than filtered out.
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I have spammers create a new domain with valid SPF and start spamming that day. they are very hard to find and block the same day.
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To block very young domains I recommend you use the fresh15.spameatingmonkey.net blacklist from Spam Eating Monkey.
Google account required (Score:2)
So now I need to open a Google account to make sure my outgoing e-mails reach Gmail?
It is getting harder and harder to avoid using their services.
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You don't need to.
Its like if you want to have a bank account, you need to sign up with a bank. Oh the evil!
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It's more like having to open an account at a bank just to send somebody money who is a customer of that bank. That's kinda antithetical to the function of a federated banking system.
That said, this seems to be more oriented toward mass mailers. It even says so in their announcement: "The Gmail Postmaster Tools help qualified high-volume senders analyze their email".
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Valid reasons I mass email our customers: system maintenance that will impact them.
Chance I want that to get through? 100%
It's All A Matter Of Perspective (Score:1)
Valid reasons I mass email our customers: Penis pills for less!
Chance I want that to get through? 100%
Probably Good (Score:5, Informative)
I know that some people are looking at that 'help companies get their mail into inboxes rather than filtered' comment with trepidation. But I don't think it's nefarious like that. I work at a small university, and it's pretty common (and frustrating for students) to have important emails like 'Here is how you log in for the first time' get filtered out as spam because the same email is sent to thousands of students... it looks like spam. These tools just let us register our domain and add tags to our emails marking it as official email from the school.
That still allows the user algorithms to reduce the significance of the email, tossing it in the 'Advertisement' category, or 'Low Priority', or other variations of 'not spam, but maybe you'd like to hide it anyway' category. But it should reduce how ofter the email is thrown away completely, and they can't even search for it because it was tossed out with the garbage.
I took a look at the postmaster tools, and as soon as the DNS update goes through (which proves to Google that I'm allowed to manage our postmaster tools) I'll have a better idea what options it gives us.
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Actually you can do the same with gmail address and many other email servers (but not all). I.e. if you have foo@bar.com, you can use foo+anyRandomString@bar.com. Too bad many lame email checkers don't understand that + is valid character in email address.
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The only workable solution is to whitelist your inbox to contacts only.
Workable? That's nearly useless. Too many spammers harvest contact lists and forge "From" fields. That sort of whitelist will allow a lot of spam through.
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They only get your contact list if you give it to them. When my name is in somebody else's contact list, it's still no problem for me. If it is not in mine, it goes through the spam filter, very simple. It has proven far and away the best solution.
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They only get your contact list if you give it to them. When my name is in somebody else's contact list, it's still no problem for me. If it is not in mine, it goes through the spam filter, very simple. It has proven far and away the best solution.
You don't have to give it to the spammers. They get it from others who have you in their contact list -- which often means they're in yours as well.
It's worked for you so far, but that's just because you've been lucky... or have a very small contact list containing nothing but very security-conscious people.
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He's right. Spammers will pay a premium to obtain a list with cross references. There's an underground market for email list and those who collect enough of them make a pretty penny.
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I registered and validated a couple of domains. However, the tools show no options for me. Probably we don't send enough emails to gmail, but I also wonder if what it needs is a number of emails AFTER registering.
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That's one of the classic BOFH jokes.
For the very young among us: The Bastard operator from Hell archive [slashdot.org]
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An email to their personal address (not their school account) for obvious reasons. Though I do have to admit that a few times mistakes have been made made (real mistakes, not BOFH in disguise) and the password reset template was emailed only to their school account.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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With most residential providers you have contractually agreed not to run a mail server. Also, you won't have a fixed IP so a receiving mail server is kind of useless. Use a commercial account/provider and you will most likely be able to obtain a fixed IP outside of the blacklisting that comes with residential IP's.
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I'm the same way. I got my gmail account back when you had to be invited. I was going to use it as a spam catcher account but I noticed quickly that no matter what I did nothing bad was really coming through. I've used it as my primary account for over 8 years now, and I think maybe 4-5 emails made it through.
Hotmail's whitelist is an effective system (Score:2)
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Re: Hotmail's whitelist is an effective system (Score:2)
How do you know his mail isn't solicited?
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I'm sending thousand of email per day
Congratulations, you're a spammer.
I don't care if the entire planet needs to be notified of an impending asteroid impact. If the information isn't specific to me AND the reasoning behind sending the message isn't specific to me, then it's NOT worth an email.
Generic emails sent to thousands/millions of people are like traditional junk mail.
Generic email sent one person (often phishing attempts) are like the old mail fraud scams.
Specific email sent to thousands/millions of people are like pre-approved credit
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"Congratulations, you're a spammer."
You're jumping to conclusions. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for that kind of mail volumes, such as administrering mail servers of a company that handles customer support tickets or a web shop with order confirmations, shipping notices, and invoices (3 emails per order). It could also be an opt-in mailing list.
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And such information would be specific to the user and the motivation would be specific to the user.
No one sending legitimate emails is getting blocked by the major blacklists. I personally haven't seen this happen in over a decade. It's always the people who spam and claim to be not spamming, or the people who run their "legitimate" email through a service known to let spammers run wild and cry when they get blocked along with the other trash.
If you wouldn't buy a first class stamp or pay a human to pick
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In fact, it's pretty easy to figure what happened.
If your IP has been blacklisted, check the DNSBL.
For example, with this site: http://www.dnsbl.info/ [dnsbl.info]
Then go to the sites that block your IP and ask to be whitelisted.
You can be blacklisted for a lot of reasons, like sending too much mails in a short amount of time on the same site (in France, we have an ISP that considers a mail is spam if you send to 10 people of their domain in a single mail), or somebody tagged your mail as spam, or it uses patterns that
It seems like this is what DMARC is built to solve (Score:3)
Except that Google basically just has a better spam filter for gmail accounts now too.
Either way, good for Google. The more awareness that can get out there for improved sender validation the better.
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Microsoft has SNDS which is pretty helpful in finding moments when things go bad. It does not identify your customers, I have to find that myself.
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Right, but just based on a quick look at postmaster tools it appears that a big chunk of how it works is sender authentication. That's all I meant.
A link of a link of a link of a link.... (Score:3)
mail filter (Score:2)
well i hope they fix their mail filters first....no matter how many ways i tell gmail amazon isn't spam...thats where it ends up...even mail from the wife does that...which she isn't pleased about
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This. Gmail has a hard time learn learning that "Please leave a survey for your last purchase!!!" is spam and "Your order shipped" is not. Either all my mail from one merchant wind up in spam or not.
Great, just great... (Score:2)
"Finally, the spam filter is better than ever at rooting out email impersonation—that nasty source of most phishing scams. Thanks to new machine learning signals, Gmail can now figure out whether a message actually came from its sender, and keep bogus email at bay."
As if that crap didn't false-positive on me way too much already.
This was an avoidable problem (Score:2)
It's extra effort, but worth it... (Score:2)
.
DKIM is actually kind of cool. I like to see inbound emails being authenticated by my email server.
DNSSEC was a pain to implement, though. That is, until I found a good, DNSSEC-friendly registrar (gkg.net) that made the switch to DNSSEC for my domain quite easy.
Now I get daily DMARC data sent to me, and also to dmarcia
Just turn of the spam filter (Score:1)