It's what happens when you can control such a large portion of a resource. Just imagine, Google can at any moment blacklist just about anyone. Most websites and companies they can do nothing to stop it.

It's a tad terrifying.

I can see where it would be in Google's interest for people to throw up their hands and decide running their own is just not worth it.

That is why I don't need to able to send from my server to Google. Accepting tyranny is just not worth it.

Haven't a clue what you mean. I run several mail servers and have no issues whatsoever with GMail. And I run through all the spam filtering, too, and only recall one that was inadvertently marked as spam but, iirc, the mailer was the problem.

I see spam from gmail all the time, and for about the last year they wouldn't accept reports from SpamCop (that changed a couple of weeks ago).

I wrote a daemon that monitors a mailbox that users can submit spam to, for spam that makes it through the other filtering layers. The daemon finds the original message in the user's mail directory, reads the headers, tracks down the originating network using whois, and then blackholes the network and emails me a notification about it.

Some networks are whitelisted for practical purposes. Google's one of them.

If necessary, I could provide a list of the subject lines of the emails that have been reported. A YC company, Zenefits, is one offender that comes immediately to mind.

But not until Monday. I'm going camping.

While we're waiting for Monday, here are some subjects of spam emails I've received from Gmail's SMTP servers recently. Mentions of my domains replaced by example.com:

   Example.com SEO Issues
   Tough Times With Example.com? Needs Attention!!?
   Get ranked higher: Example.com
   Google optimization for Example.com
   Get ranked higher : example.com
   Website Audit Report to increase website traffic
   Example.com - audit report now available
   Give a glamorous new look to your website
   Web Design Proposal example.com
   Organic SEO Promotion For Example.com

So looks like all SEO and web-design advertising.

What a coincidence, that's Google's core business!

Back. Here's a recent selection of subject lines, extracted from spam daemon replies. The "Zenefits + Problem" ones are funny .. my dba is "No Problem", and they're not smart enough to correctly handle that I guess, which makes sense, since they're also dumb enough to spam me. I've never replied to any of their messages.

    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Higher Targeted Traffic: Associatedtechs.Com"
    "Re:re: UL,CE,ETL Split-core Current Transformer(0.333V or 1A/5A output) ,Rogowski coil,hall AC-DC transducer"
    "Poor support processes could be costing you customers"
    "Get ranked higher:"
    "Higher Targeted Traffic: Associatedtechs.Com"
    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Your Website...!"
    "Get ranked higher: associatedtechs.com"
    "Google Update for: associatedtechs.com"
    "How to increase your website traffic and generating leads??"
    "Zenefits + Problem"
    "Mobile Apps Development"
    "Digital marketing proposal- www.associatedtechs.com"

This isn't a complete list, sadly, since it turns out the daemon isn't logging ban attempts against whitelisted networks. I should fix it so that it does.