Discussion

noobermin: It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.

SilverElfin: Good luck. These big tech companies have no incentive to care about support or really anything that isn’t tied directly to making money. And unless you have a friend there, Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.

rockskon: Cynicism helps no one.

unmole: > get money for freeHow do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?

ranger_danger: I think there are lots of people that will see this story that either work at google or know someone who does, and I bet it will lead to their issue getting fixed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

throwaway27448: It would help if they provided literally any way for a squeaky wheel to squeak at them aside from squeaking at the employees with a modicum of dignity (if they still exist)

TheChaplain: It seems weird that Google wouldn't have some kind of observability alert on outgoing email. 10k emails per week is a lot.

throwuxiytayq: Maybe they should try getting a paid Google Workspace subscription /s

subroutine: To me, this on is tricky. Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?

tjpnz: This is a plausible explanation based on the amount of fraud tolerated in other parts of their business. But it's probably going to cost you more than one Workspace subscription.

noobermin: A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.

tjpnz: Spammer must be a whale spending untold amounts on other Google services.

ranger_danger: Advertising and eyeballs, I'd assume

oivey: It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.

unmole: Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader> ridiculous assertion.What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.

compounding_it: What if someone (Google) used Google suite to send 10k emails to fire people. Wouldn’t that be considered normal for the server for a day let alone a week. Yes I know I could have come up with a better example.

bmandale: >How do they get money for free?market power>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?see above

unmole: Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?

gambiting: Those would be internal so I'm not sure they'd even count against your quota.

noobermin: It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.

superfrank: I'm not sure it actually is. Free Gmail is limited to 500 emails a day, but Workspace accounts are allowed up to 2000, so this this spammer has to be using a Workspace account.I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.

darkwater: No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.

urban_winter: Google suspend email accounts that get lots of spam reports. It happens a couple of times a year for salespeople in my company who use Gmass (a bulk email sending tool).I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.

protocolture: They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails.How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?

mindslight: Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.

protocolture: But theres not even that going on.Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".

ranger_danger: > You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?

blitzar: ye olde corporate reply to all bomb .. no more emails this week everyone, we have used up our quota

bigfatkitten: Google’s support for paying customers isn’t much better unless you’re spending well into the millions per year.AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.

unmole: > It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious.You're being disingenuous.> You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.More rectally derived assertions.

robot-wrangler: > How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expectZero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. the constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota is pretty damn villainous

themafia: Try running your own SMTP server for a while. Gmail holds what appears to be monopoly power and uses it quite readily. Even ISPs with "free" customer email addresses aren't nearly as onerous as google is.

compounding_it: The example was given to say you could be a gsuite customer and have 10k emails a week be very normal. Something that wouldn’t trigger any alarms unless set. The alarms would probably be set on a curve. Something unusual would be far off the curve.

unmole: So, Google built a superior product that is profitable and we are supposed to be mad about this?

JoshTriplett: > Gmail is not a monopoly.https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491> For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address.> In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.

thayne: It may not be a single email, they might be using many throwaway accounts.

thayne: Having a workspace subscription still doesn't get you a human to talk to.

BLKNSLVR: If it didn't provide value it wouldn't exist.Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).

throwawaysoxjje: I wonder if this has to do with the massive number of google calendar invites I’ve been getting as payment/billing notifications lately.I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them

hgaddipa001: Would love to have you on Slashy :)Slashy.comWe actually respond to customers!

grey-area: Gmail shows ads to make money so it is not loss making. Google Workspace charges money per user (and still offers abysmal support).