Wandering Thoughts archives

Google Groups fails both anti-spam and basic mailing list management

Back in September I wrote about a spammer who was using Google Groups to send out their spam. Google Groups let them add one of my addresses to a very large list and then was perfectly happy to be used to broadcast their spam messages through the list. Well. Guess what. The spam is still happening; generally two messages a day, or at least two delivery attempts a day. This is what you could politely call a total failure on Google's part from two perspectives, because none of these delivery attempts have ever succeeded.

None. Zero. That's right; for months, my system has been rejecting at SMTP time every delivery attempt from this Google Groups mailing list. This is now far more than allowing a spammer to use their services to email me (and others); it is now clear that Google Groups fails basic mailing list management practices. One very fundamental basic practice of mailing lists is you stop mailing addresses that bounce, most especially if these addresses have never had any successful deliveries, ever, which is the case here.

Ignoring rejections and bounces is not a sign of good mailing list management software, given that automatic handling of bounces and automatic unsubscription of bouncing addresses has been a basic feature of mailing list software for somewhere around a decade or more. However, it is a red letter sign of spammer mailing list software.

I am not sure I believe that Google has consciously turned Google Groups into a tool for spammers; I would certainly like to think better of Google and it seems hardly worth Google's time, all things considered. But the alternative is to conclude that Google Groups is written and run by people who are incompetent (on one level or another), and that seems equally uncharacteristic of Google.

Attention marketers: blog comments are not email

This is another one of those entries that I shouldn't have to write and that will never be read by the people who need to read it, but I'm going to tilt at windmills today. I am doing so because today, someone left a more or less marketing comment on a random entry here in an attempt to get in touch with me.

Let's skip the whole marketing side of this and go straight to the problem, which is that blog comments are not email. I don't mean that in just a direct sense, I mean that in that they have completely different purposes. Email is a private message to a single person. At least in theory, a blog comment is part of a public conversation that is related to the entry that it is attached to (it is a reaction, a comment, or so on).

(This distinction matters to me because I want other people who read the comments here to get something of value from doing so. That's really the point of having public comments instead of encouraging people to email me; the resulting conversation and notes are visible in public for other people.)

A comment that is not part of this public conversation is noise, not signal, and simply by existing it invites people to waste their time by reading it. Whether or not they realize it, people who leave 'comments as email' comments are adding noise to your blog; they are willing to inconvenience all of your readers in order to get your attention.

Well, they got my attention, but probably not in the way they wanted. I do not like having noise added to my blog. When it happens, I do not think well of the people behind it, especially when they could just as well have sent email instead.

(It is my personal opinion that all of this is intuitively obvious, even if people cannot necessarily immediately explain why c-o-e comments are bad.)

(And of course I remove the comment just like I remove other forms of noise, such as spam. Note that a c-o-e comment is not necessarily comment spam as such, unless you have a very broad definition of 'comment spam'. This doesn't make it non-spam either; much like a similar email, it depends on whether or not it was done in bulk. Mind you, I suspect that often it will be.)