How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
> ridiculous assertion.
What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
You're being disingenuous.
> You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
More rectally derived assertions.
https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491
> For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address.
> In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
market power
>What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
see above
Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. the constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota is pretty damn villainous
AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.
Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.
It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).
I've worked at a start up where the marketing team just had a `marketing@startup.com` email that was just like any other email in Google Workspace and used that for all marketing communications. Eventually they bumped up against that limit and a couple of engineers had to help them troubleshoot and there were enough blog and stack overflow posts at the time about hitting the limit to make make me think what they were doing wasn't uncommon.
When you consider the scale of Gmail and that this is almost certainly a Workspace account so they're mixed in with business customers, I'm not sure how much of an anomaly 10k emails a week actually is.
I mention it only as a useful data point, and in the absence of anyone else on the thread mentioning that Google have robust email abuse monitoring.
Slashy.com
We actually respond to customers!
I’ve not been reporting them because I already know they aren’t valid and do not google’s work for them
It sometimes stops for weeks, then it continiues.
from my logs as an example: Nov 13 22:10:51 bert postfix/smtpd[2693931]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-oi1-x248.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-oi1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:07 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-ua1-x948.google.com[2607:f8b0:4864:20::948]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBD77RLFFQACRBZOX3DEAMGQEU5V3LXY@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer1000@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-ua1-x948.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:18 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x346.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::346]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer13@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x346.google.com> Nov 13 22:12:37 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lf1-x146.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::146]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer333@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lf1-x146.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<hc+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBB2QEZ74@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com> Nov 13 22:13:08 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-wm1-x345.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::345]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayerrmayer@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-wm1-x345.google.com> Nov 13 22:14:03 bert postfix/smtpd[2696594]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-lj1-x248.google.com[2a00:1450:4864:20::248]: 450 4.1.8 <ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<ki+bncBDO2ZDH5DIIOXB6ZZADBUBFIYC6HQ@zf.thesparklebar.com> to=<rmayera@nerd-residenz.de> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-lj1-x248.google.com>
As you can see, the to-address is generated and its different hosts at google trying to send mails.
Searching for zf.thesparklebar.com shows others having the same problem.
SilverElfin•3h ago
rockskon•1h ago
ranger_danger•1h ago
throwaway27448•1h ago
snickerbockers•1h ago