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This morning I took a look at the spam I received overnight. Excluding what my system rejected (so, messages that never reached my inbox), 87% came from MSFT or Google - straight from the mail servers of those two companies.
Yet many people choose these big providers - now near monopolies - because they "actively fight spam".
Or maybe fighting spam is just the perfect excuse to crush the decentralization of email?
@stefano looking at my Spam, Amazon seems to also be used a lot to relay Spam.
@stefano I simply block everything from gmail, except a handful of whitelisted addresses of people I know.
This is not a solution if you are running a mailserver for more users than just your family, of course. But works very well for me.
@stefano This is very close to what I experience too. Looking at the spam that reaches an inbox here, it is very rare to find any that did not come from MSFT or GOOG infrastructure.
@pitrh I think that our antispam engines are good enough to filter most of the spam. But a "legit" mail coming from a MSFT or GOOG infrastructure is much more complicated to spot.
@stefano also GOOG has some odd ideas about what it considers spam.
I had a problem reaching GOOG hosted domains from my regular address -- my messages consistently went to the spam folder or just disappeared.
Then it turned out that the problem was my .signature had a reference to blogspot.com -- a GOOG hosted domain, which for some reason had made it onto one of the spamhaus badness lists, leading to a reject when trying to post to a mailing list for that reason.
@stefano so we had GOOG content filtering rejecting mail over a reference to a GOOG hosted service.
I have since sanitized my .signature, which seems to help, but I still randomly get my messages to GOOG hosted domain spamboxed.
Never any reason given or response to queries, of course.
@pitrh they will never reply, as their intention is to convince people that "you need their services to ensure high reliability in delivery".
Some of my customers tried and they even received more spam (or some legit mails in spam). After one year, most of them decided to go back to their self hosted servers.
I've been thinking the same for a while. They seem pretty good with their incoming spam filters so why are their outgoing filters so bad. If our filters can catch spam and even (banking) phishing mails coming from their systems, surely they should be able to catch them.
The newest thing I see coming a lot from Google's systems is spam from *@*.firebaseapp.com
@stefano the vast majority of spam that gets through my spam filters comes from gmail. It is difficult to block as it looks legit dkim and spf-wise. Google may be good at inbound spam detection but they are atrocious at outbound, I am fortunate that I am able to downscore gmail mails because of my size and client base, but many won't be able to. Maybe everyone should though!
@stefano *incoming* spam.
@stefano before Russia invaded Ukraine I used a free Yandex email account. I was told that I couldn't use it for signing into things and to just create a free email at gmail because the spam email comes from Yandex / Russia. Most of my spam came from Gmail. Not saying Yandex emails didn't send spam though probably they did, but no more than Gmail or Hotmail or any other free open for all email provider.
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