While on the Topic of Google Spam...

I wonder if the folks over at Google got the message that service providers had finally had enough of dealing with the backscatter that was coming out of their mail servers because it has also significantly dropped off since we first started talking about it back in April.  Backscatter (bounce messages attempting to be delivered to users that do not exist) rates from Google were over 50% on some days.  This means that over 50% of the total mail that we were receiving from Google were these invalid bounces.  The backscatter rate has dropped now to about 2% of the total mail from Google.  That is still higher than what most would call acceptable, but when you are comparing over 500k messages per day to about 10-15k, I would say that is a significant improvement no matter how you slice it.

Unfortunately, though the problem has shifted from backscatter to 419 phishing scams.  A 419 phishing scam is the advance fee fraud type of scam where for a small amount of money you can be promised to receive much more in return.  419 scams are also typically called Nigerian Scams.  The term 419 comes from the Nigerian Criminal Code that deals with fraud.

Although still about 25% of the email that we get from Google's network is spam, the traffic has shifted from about 50% backscatter to about 50% phishing, in particular from IP addresses that start with 72.14.204, 72.14.214, and 72.14.246.  

This is certainly not intended to single out Google either as they are not the only free webmail provider that we see enormous amounts of spam from.  We see plenty from Yahoo and Hotmail as well.  Google is the main provider on everyone's radar right now because of the quickly changing nature of attacks against their system and the rapidly changing view across many different industries of the viability of using Google as their business mail host.  More and more legitimate businesses are having trouble sending email from their hosted GMail accounts to service providers because Google's mail servers are ending up on block lists with increasing regularity, a trend that is only gaining momentum amongst industry insiders.