Google bites back in Bigpond spat

FOLLOWING ON FROM yesterday's report about the impasse between Google and Bigpond over spam filtering, reports have emerged about Google's action to limit spamming from it's Gmail service.

Bigpond put the onus firmly on Google to clean up its Gmail act, claiming that its own record on filtering outgoing spam is second to none, and asking why Google can't do the same.

It has now emerged that Google rose to as high as ninth place on the Trend Micro spam ‘hit list.' This is obviously bad news for the world's third largest provider of free webmail services.

But it has spurred Google into action. After working on the problem in the last few days, Google has dropped to fifty-sixth, and then down to seventy-fourth on the list assessing spam emanating from email providers.

That it has taken a series of complaints, and broader coverage in the media, for Google to be spurred into action is no good thing. Google claims to actively monitor blacklists, an assertion which contradicts Bigpond's claim.

One wonders if the recent fuss on these pages, and elsewhere, has actually spurred Google to change its policies regarding outgoing spam, which it does claim to monitor. If it has not changed its policies, how long will it be before it starts to climb up the rankings again?

Yesterday's piece also brought forth a flood of emails from loyal INQ readers, all ready to relate their tale of Google-induced spam problems. Scott J wrote, for example,

"As a small multiuser admin, I've regularly blocked gmail for policy reasons. Complaints to the abuse desk have been returned with a wheeze which runs ‘we can't help you because the mail didn't originate from one of our IPs' Well duh. But, one of their IPs was more than happy to forward it."

Others were more than happy to support Google, claiming that since they never receive much spam to their inbox, they really could not care. This correspondent uses Gmail very happily as his primary account. But there is a bigger issue in play here, that being that spammers should not be given unnecessary free kicks by the search giant. µ