Hello All, As we all know, Google and Microsoft dominates email relay in many places and they are getting even larger with each passing year.
They are not getting larger because they are offering great email service but because they are ever more aggressive and sometimes under handed and do not behave decently or in an ethical way. if the present trends continue, there will be almost no email relay that does not operate through either Microsoft or Google. Interesting thing that all of us (and Microsoft) should take careful note of is that Google has done a deal with Cisco (Talos SpamCop) whereby reports about abuse (including spear phish, spam, scams, etc) - are no longer sent to Google (ab...@google.com) but directly to the relay ipv4/ipv6 abuse ISP contact. When there is no ipv4/ipv6 abuse contact the complaints are discarded and in a minority of cases, still go to ab...@google.com Microsoft of course has two attack vectors. One the 'custom' protocols of their exchange servers and the other is that they mix legit email and spear phish, payday loan scams from the same servers. Google has now also started doing the same thing. Before Google used to be more responsive to abuse complaints and there were fewer actual criminal activity relayed by Google. So, it is becoming more frequent and common to find spear phish attack on a client, from Google and Microsoft and this motivates clients to move services to Microsoft or Google. I do not think that there is much an abuse wg can discuss around this, as there is not much or anything that any of us can actually do about the present situation as both Google and Microsoft has simply become too large and year on year they are getting larger. Any comments?
