British Expat Forum

I got a 419 scam in my mail today. So I did the usual and traced headers, complained. He/it was using a gmail address, so I forwarded the message to gmail. This is the correspondence that resulted:

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How ridiculous. Users will not take the trouble to visit a site to fill in an abuse complaint. I will simply take this as a brick wall to stop legitimate users complaining about abuse - thereby making google party to that abuse.

The Google Team wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We understand the urgent nature of your message and recommend that you
> visit the Gmail Privacy & Security Help Center at
> https://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12784 for immediate
> assistance.
>
> If you'd like to report a Gmail user who has sent messages that violate
> the Gmail Program Policies and/or Terms of Use, please fill out a report
> form at
> http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse_phishing.
> We'll investigate your report and may send a warning or discontinue Gmail
> service for users who violate our policies.
>
> If your issue is not related to abuse, please visit our Help Center at
> http://mail.google.com/support/ or click 'Help' at the top of any Gmail
> page for troubleshooting tips.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Google Team
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What do you think? Does it seem ridiculous to expect people to visit a site and fill in a form to complain about abuse? Why can't they just take complaints in the regular manner?

With the volumes they handle, I think they're probably right to get users to submit via forms to the appropriate categories. These will go straight to a database without needing to be transcribed from an email message.

I would expect that the gmail e-mail address you sent your report to is an autoresponder (they may try analysing it with some experimental AI applications to get a feel for what it's about).

Their goal will be to minimise the amount of skilled human resource they need.

Well, how much categorisation is really needed Mike? It's either spam, phishing, or 419ers. All pretty much have to be dealt with in the same way.

There is no way they can deal with any of these types of abuse without human interaction.

Now, looking at it from the other perspective: those of us that deal with these scum daily - and attempt to not let them get away with it (for the benefit of all e-mail users) - have their work cut out as it is.
To have to interrupt their regular complaint work flow, get involved in copy and paste, visiting web sites and filling in forms, makes it wholly unusable if they intend to get anything else done that day.

All of that extra work makes absolutely no difference to Google because if they're going to address it, they're going to have to have a human look at it anyway.
All things considered, I see the whole web form business as gaining nothing but vastly reducing the successful attempts at resolution of abuse.
As I said above, I see such attempts to silence the aggrieved as being party to the abuse.

I sympathise, Alan. But the small guys like us can't do much about it - or can we?

Yahoo! seriously p!ssed me off when people were constantly stealing our content and posting it (without even crediting us as the source) on Yahoo! Answers. We had to jump through all kind of hoops to insist that they removed postings with the theft of our content from their site.

You see, they're one of the big guys - so it's our problem to prove that they published content stolen from us.

Now look at the other way. What if I, or one of our users, went onto Yahoo! and stole their content and published it on my site. What do you think would happen then? Oh yes, I remember, as a publisher I'm liable for what's published on my site.

You just can't win against these guys so it's pointless banging your head against a brick wall about it.

Doesn't hurt to have a rant about it sometimes, though.

Sorry, Alan. I hadn't realised that the contact address you used was dedicated to reporting abuse - in that case, your anger is justified.

Try Tweeting - it might get a lot of RTs.