Increasingly, we are receiving spam originating from Gmail that is sent to addresses with three ellipses (for example, davidh…@tqmcube.com). Clearly, these are harvested from Google Groups. If Gmail fails to identify spam and spammers through their transmission of email to undeniably scraped addresses then their incompetence is nothing short of astonishing.

A “Jump Through Hoops” Approach

While Gmail publishes an abuse address (gmail-abuse@google.com) spam submissions are ignored. Gmail provide an auto-response which indicates that the spam, with headers, must be parsed to their web form. Making it more difficult for people to report abuse results in less abuse being reported. Recipients must have the ability to report spam by forwarding the spam as an attachment which keeps the headers intact.