Aussie ISP slams Google

OUR PIECE here concerning Telstra's problems with Gmail brought a fiery response from the Aussie ISP. Craig Middleton, the Bigpond Corporate Affairs manager, had some choice words for your correspondent, in which he hit back at allegations that the blame for the recent problems that have arisen between the Gmail and Bigpond mail services lay with Telstra.

Craig said in an email: “We are the only ISP in Australia to have staff and resources applied full time to anti-spam measures. We filter some 70 million spam emails from our network (inbound and outbound) every day. While we subscribe to Trend Micro's RBL, we also monitor it to ensure that if we get listed, as can sometimes happen, we promptly take the steps to get de-listed.”

What is implied here is that Google does not take the same steps to monitor its outbound mail, but should be doing so. As Craig says, “What has annoyed us about this incident is that our customers were negatively impacted by slow or no action by Google. It seems they want to outsource the spam problem emanating from their own accounts. Filtering outgoing mail, as we do, might be a good first step (to fixing the blacklisting problem.)”

The difficulty for Telstra, in this case, was that save from pointing out the problem to Google, all that could be done to fix the problem, by Telstra, was to ‘whitelist' the servers emitting spam - something that they obviously would not want to do.

In another letter from a reader, it was pointed out that Telstra is not the only mail service that has blocked Gmail due to high spam volumes.

Reader Philip Moller SJ wrote to say: "Re: blocking Gmail, I can tell you it goes much further than Telstra. Both the dedicated spam firewall devices Ironport and Barracuda's latest update automatically dropped all @gmail.com emails, and even my trusty Brightmail app (Symantec) has applied a very harsh tag rating to gmail mail. Luckily everything gets quarantined, so I was able to save the situation."

This leads one to ask if Google is asleep at the wheel in the fight against spam? It's all very well to biggest inbox and whiz-bang Ajax interface, but if a high percentage of those 51 million users are pesky spammers, than the Santa Clara-based company may well need to change its approach to spam fighting. We await a response from Google. µ