Internet Pro News

Gmail Pulled Over By SpamCop

By David A. Utter
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2006-01-30

419 scam emails coming from IP addresses belonging to Google's Gmail service landed in SpamCop spamtrap accounts, leading SpamCop to blacklist those addresses.

While they are on the blacklist, those IP addresses cannot send mail to mailservers that filter incoming messages according to the SpamCop blacklist. Spam Kings posted about the problem, and noted how some users also reported receiving spam from Gmail addresses.

At press time, the three IP addresses reported by Spam Kings had not been delisted from the SpamCop database. Spam Kings wrote about why Gmail has its attractions for spammers:

As we've noted before, Gmail is interesting from a spammer's perspective because it doesn't show the sender's IP address in the message headers. That could give spammers a layer of protection.

One of the spams that apparently caused the blacklisting was a 419 scam and looks like this.

Further investigation by Spam Kings showed the addresses in question hadn't made their way onto other blacklists.

As an email client, Gmail appears to do a good job at filtering spam, as observed by those who use it at WebProNews. Google has attempted to prevent wider abuse of the system by restricting how new users join Gmail, at first by limiting them to being invited by an existing user, and later permitting new users to join by using a mobile phone number to obtain a SMS invite from Google.

---

Drag this

to your Bookmarks.

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo My Web

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.