From: David Ford [mailto:david@blue-labs.org]

I feel fairly sure in saying that most mailing list software, newsgroup software, and communication software in general, will allow you to preemptively add people to your address book, subscription lists, etc. Every router and switch out there allows forged packets through them, should we lambast the hardware manufacturers even though numerous accompanying handbooks recommend good practice configurations?

Google has been very quick to deal with issues of spammers every time I have brought it up.

On 02/04/10 02:56, Jim Mercer wrote:

...

"here, have some free guns. oh, by the way, its probably bad if you go around shooting people, so don't do that."

it is starting too look to me like google is quite happy to host spammers.

or, at best, doesn't care if spammers use them to host their services.

I've found gmail is the current favored account amongst forum spammers; I have to assume they are doing nothing about abuse complaints because I find it quite unlikely that the forums I operate just happen to be the first ones that get abused by accounts signed up with gmail addresses. I report each one to their abuse address, probably goes to bit bucket. gmail is probably still 'beta' though so it's ok to let spammers use that too. David