Lately, I have noticed an unsettling trend: more and more of the spam emails I get are coming from Google Gmail accounts. Perhaps you’ve noticed the same thing.
Now the consequences of that appear to be hitting the Gmail system. I have a Gmail account that I use for personal communication, and another couple of Gmail accounts that I use for business communication. Those are left over from the time before I had my own family of internet marketing websites with their accompanying email accounts.
I have not changed everything over to my own website email addresses, simply because there are quite a few membership sites, newsletters, etc. that use those Gmail accounts. It’s easier to let things stay as they are – at at least it was easier. Now I may be forced to abandon Gmail.
Why? Every day, I send out a few to a few dozen emails from my collection of Gmail accounts.
Surprise! I am now getting half or more of those bounced back, with a message from the destination domain that the “domain gmail.com has been blocked due to spam or forgery”.
Rarely, one or two of them are emails I did not send, indicating that someone is using my Gmail address as the return address on their spam emails, which they can easily do without even hacking my account. You could do it too (but please don’t – the legal ramifications are not good).
So I have begun to switch everything over from my now less-usable Gmail accounts to ones on several of my own domains. I just can’t be sending out emails and not knowing if they will get delivered. It makes for more work for me.
For example, the worst of it is that many of the email delivery failure notices show up in my Gmail Spam folder, which I checked infrequently. Now, after I take care of the ones that actually showed up in my Inbox, I have to check the Spam folder almost every day to know which messages didn’t get delivered.
Then comes more extra work, too. I then have to check the Sent folder, and “forward” the bounced emails back to the original addressee, editing out the FW or Fwd additions to the subject line and the forwarding info added at the top of the email. That way, they still look like the originals.
Then I have to copy-and-paste them and send them using another outgoing email server (not a Gmail one) from one of my own website accounts. I’m getting tired of doing this multiple times a day to about half the emails I send from a Gmail account. It looks like Gmail, of necessity, is going to get retired bit-by-bit from my stable of email accounts.
I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Yahoo and AOL have been in this situation for a long time. How many times have you signed up for a newsletter and seen the message not to use a Yahoo or AOL account, or you might not receive your confirmation email (or it will show up in your Spam folder). Quite often, the newsletter site will even recommend using a Gmail account.
I believe that that situation may be on the verge of coming to a screeching halt, with Gmail being added to the “taboo” list with Yahoo and AOL.
It’s unfortunate, but it comes along with the territory of being one of the big players in the email arena. Spammers are eventually going to be attracted to the size of the playing field provided by a Yahoo or a Gmail. Since they change addresses every mailing, they don’t care. The consequences fall on the everyday bread-and-butter users of those accounts, you and I. By adding to our workload, it makes those particular email accounts less useful, and we switch to a different, perhaps smaller, email provider to avoid the hassles.