

Ask HN: GMail's reputation/usefulness amongst spammers? - slater

First off: No, I'm not a spammer, nor am I in any way affiliated with that particular part of our networked world. What got me on to this question is GMail's track record with keeping spam down (at least in my inbox).<p>My question is, has GMail reached such good spam-blocking/-flagging efficiency that when spammers get new lists of potential victims, do they just auto-purge all @gmail.com addresses from the list first?
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Travis
Like you, I have no ties with the UCE industry, but here are my guesses
regarding this topic.

I highly doubt they purge gmail addresses. I still get spam in there. And
incremental costs are so minimal to spammers, that why would they bother?
That's kind of the whole reason spam works despite microscopic conversion
rates.

I also doubt that google shares their anti-spam tech or reports with other
mail providers. Each company wants to keep their proprietary stuff secret, and
anti-spam tends to have a bit of secret sauce. Now, say google, microsoft, and
yahoo got together and shared reputation information, you might see spammers
start to avoid those systems (at least from their main botnets) in an effort
to not hurt their "reputation".

By and large, though, I just think they are willing to spam any address that
they think has a small chance of getting to a person. Frequently they're run
by bot nets at such small incremental costs. There's no compelling reason for
them to do this.

FWIW, using the Pivotal Veracity / Returnpath tools (which estimate delivery
rates by using seedlists), I've found that MSN is much more likely to mark
something as spam, compared with gmail. Weird, I know.

