The issue that really alarmed me was that I received bounce back email from addresses that were refusing to accept emails from my address. I had nothing to do with sending any of them.
I received 12 of these during the last week of November (none since then). They were Spanish spam - here’s a sample of one. The sender is indicated as various spanish names@<qwest’s> gmail.com
I sent a message to gmail staff that I didn’t want my email address involved with outgoing spam. They didn’t respond, but there were no further bounce backs.
Well, I can, with about 99.999% certainty, say that Google is not responsible for the fact that your email address is showing up in the “From:” line of someone else’s spam emails. The fact that it stopped after you sent off your mail to Gmail is almost definitely a coincidence.
Personally, I would not be all that concerned. What has probably already happened is that they’ve moved on to using someone else’s email. If you keep getting them, I’d say your options would probably be to contact Google and get a new account; if you’re only using it to receive forwarded emails anyway, it should be of minimal inconvenience to you. Or, if you have (and I’ll bet you do) unused GMail invites sitting around you can just send one to yourself and set up a new one.
Wow. Gmail gives you text ads that are relevant to your interests and also directs spam you may find interesting, filtering out the crap you don’t want. How considerate.
I’m a little confused… I don’t hold Gmail at all responsible for the fact that I get spam. I certainly don’t think they’re directing spam to my inbox that they think I might be interested in. Every single piece of spam I’ve gotten has gone to my Spam folder, and they’ve all been cheap software offers. Based on my inbox’s contents, I’m pretty sure that if Gmail were sending spam to my inbox when they thought it might interest me, that the software spam would have done so.
As far as the text ads go, they are amazingly unobtrusive - I actually have had to search them out. And, I knew that there would be text ads when I signed up for the service, so I’m not about to complain about that.
When I gave up on hotmail, I was getting 150 a day. In two days, the mailbox would be full. I think the capacity has gotten larger since then, so now it would take maybe 4 days to fill up.
I put my Gmail address all over the Internet, and to date, after using the service for several months, I have gotten 7 spam e-mails.
I take advantage of Gmail’s acceptance of the + sign in the e-mail. For example, when I signed up here i used reflection+straightdope@gmail.com. Not only are the spammers not picking up addresses of this type (yet. now that they have read my post… ), but when i start getting spam I can see who the asshole merchant is that sold my address because it has name on it.
I get about 7 pieces of spam per day - Rolex spam, porn spam, “Citizens Bank” spam.
Interestingly, I have an e-mail account forwarding to gmail as well, through Comcast. Comcast has a great spam filter, but there’s no way to see what’s being filtered out with them - there’s no spam folder on their webmail. For a while I wondered if the spam I was getting at gmail was spam that was originally going to Comcast, got forwarded, and wound up being intercepted by both. I’m probably wrong though.
And I’m a firstname.lastname@gmail user. I wonder if I should create a new account?
Not - it happens all the time to many email addresses. The spammers get a list of, say, 1 million addresses. They use one of these as a spoofed outgoing address. Nothing to do with Gmail at all. I even got a spam from myself the other day.
I got my first Gmail spam Monday. The Vicodin one.
It was definitelynot addressed to my account. There was only 4 letter matches between the account name it was sent to and mine. I.e., about half the account name was a mismatch.
This is a bad thing for Gmail to be doing.
I have been unhappy with Gmail from day one, this isn’t making things any better.
You’re not understanding, I don’t think. Just because the “To: line” says that it’s TO someone whose name is close to yours, does not mean that it is to that person at all, or if it is, that it’s ONLY to that person. I am rather sure that GMail is not redirecting mail with invalid addresses to another address with a close match.
This is not a Gmail thing, this is a spammer thing. Check any spam that you get from any other account. If you don’t have at least one piece of spam that appears to be addressed to someone other than you, I will be highly amazed.
As a further, to prove the point, should you choose to agree, I will send an email to the account that the spam was just sent to. If you get it, I will eat my hat.
FWIW, I am not vigorously defending Google in general; just not happy to let anyone else take the blame for the work of spammers.
I haven’t recieved any one gmail. But then again, no one will randomly generate my email address, at priestessoforgo. Not a hot ticket item. I hate hotmail because they put good stuff in the spam box.
You’d think it was the “Julie” that was getting hits, but no, they come addressed to things like “Javajoyjoy” (very Ren & Stimpyish), or Javajuice, or javajumpy.
