Google says it's sorry for Monday's hours-long Gmail delays Google apologized on Tuesday for a networking glitch that prevented emails from reaching many Gmail users' accounts for as much as two hours or even longer. "The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure," Gmail site reliability engineer Sabrina Farmer wrote in a blog post. "This is a very rare event in …
Hey, here's a silly idea. Gmail doesn't need more capacity, it needs LESS spam. Why doesn't the google give us some powerful and effective anti-spam tools that allow us (the VAST majority of us who hate spam) help target and destroy the spammers' business models? If you cut them away from the few suckers who feed them money or personal data or zombie computers, then the spammers will not become decent human beings, but at least some of them will move under less visible rocks. Apart from their sociopathic greed, the spammers are also lazy bastards, and if you increase the required effort, many of them will look for easier scams.
Actually, I admit that Gmail has more anti-spammer tools than some of the other email systems. You could even argue that Gmail is the leading email system--but you'd have to twist and turn to find the justifications. For example, below is the link to one of their "best" anti-spammer tools, but if you study how it actually works, you have to conclude it is a piece of garbage compared to what it could be.
https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse
Tedious and effectively useless, but it could be made into something useful--though it has been substantially unchanged for as long as I can recall.
So why is the google so tolerant of spammers? I'm convinced it is because of the EVIL that has taken over the company. I used to think it mostly wasn't their fault. After all, the American legal system is written by the most easily corrupted politicians working for the least ethical and greediest businessmen. Of course the rules of the business game reward EVIL. Then I found out that the google is so EVIL as to be the leading lobbyist among tech firms. If you can't beat 'em, join in the EVIL game, eh?
Spam? A serious problem at Gmail? Not in my experience.
My e-mail(s) are scattered hither and yon all over the the Internet, and I seldom see more than a dozen messages a day in my Gmail spam folder. (Yes, I do check it daily, for that one message in a thousand that is filtered wrongly. Although it's likely less than that...)
I remember the bad old days of trying to keep my spam filter settings caught up in whatever standalone desktop mail application I was using - the ability to entirely ignore spam is one of the reasons why I like Gmail so much.
Indeed, I used to sign up for stuff using a hotmail account because I was worried that it would get spammed... and it does, to the tune of hundreds of messages per day.
Until I realized that GMail is basically immune to spam. I sign up for everything using my GMail account and I get maybe 2 spam messages per week that get past the filters. Maybe 10-20 messages per day in the spam folder.
I assume that when Google is 100% certain that a message is spam, it just gets deleted, and I assume they delete hundreds of emails that are sent to me per day. Thank you, Google.
The cynic in me wonders whether this first post was written by a google marketing bod. Marketeers like it when their product is roundly defended in the face of unfair criticism, and it takes our attention away from the screw-up!
(Still, I was one of those who recommended the reply, as I too find Gmail to be excellent at spam filtering*)
(*Hmm... I'm at it too. Perhaps I'm the gmail marketing bod! Damn! )
Sorry, but just like others, I don't get any (real) spam on any of my GMail accounts (I have several, private and business).
I was effected by this outage, some emails that were send in the morning (7am-8am PST) didn't arrive until late afternoon. One was kind of critical, as it was a business related one, but otherwise, not too bad of an issue.
Again, GMail might not be perfect but spam is certainly not a problem with them. Now those folks that are unfortunate to have a Yahoo email account, now that's a complete different story... :-(
El Reg, whilst you're at it, you might like to ask Google wtf is going on at YouTube. Love it or hate it, if you use it properly it can be a useful showcase (we use it for disseminating "how to's" for our customers). At the moment though there is so much broken it's nigh on unusable. Our subscribers haven't had a reliable feed of our updates for days now, they have no idea of what we've uploaded. Many videos either don't play or only partially play.
For a socially connected video distribution site, it fails on the only two metrics that matter.
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