Google Apps for ISPs is gone

Google Apps for ISPs is being shut down. While this was a scheduled end of life, apparently some users weren’t notified (always keep the contact email address up to date at your vendor!) and other users were told that it would be discontinued in July and were surprised when their service was turned off a month earlier than they expected.
I’ve not seen any reports of mail bouncing due to this yet, but it’s likely that some consumer ISPs will be scrambling to migrate to new email providers and their inbound mail may be a mess for a while. If you see domain-wide problems at consumer domains, check to see if their MXes point at the google aspmx cluster.
It seems to be a rolling shutdown, and some ISPs have apparently had their service extended by a few days or weeks, so issues may start with some domains throughout the month.

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Questions on Google lawsuit post

A couple questions in the previous discussion thread about the Google privacy case. Both concern permission granted to Google to scan emails.
Google’s stance about this is fairly simple.
Gmail users give explicit permission for their mail to be scanned.
People who send mail to Gmail users give implicit permission for their mail to be scanned.
The plaintiff’s lawyers are alleging that some subset of gmail users – specifically those at Universities that use Google apps and ISP customers like CableOne – did not give explicit permission for their mail to be scanned by Google. They’re also arguing no senders give permission.
In addition to the lack of permission, the plaintiffs lawyers are arguing that Google’s behaviour is in violation of Google’s own policies.
Google thinks scanning is part of the ordinary course of business and they’re doing nothing wrong.
This is an interesting case. I think anyone who knows about email understands that the people who run the mail server have the ability to read anything that goes through. But a lot of us trust that most postmaster and admin types consider it unprofessional to look at mail without a decent reason. There are good reasons an admin might need to go into a mail spool.
Automated filtering is simply a part of life on the internet these days. Mails have to be scanned for viruses, spam and, yes, they are scanned for targeted advertising. I’m not convinced Google is outside the norm when they say that any emails sent through Google is personal information given too Google and therefore Google can use that information in accordance with their policies.

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Spammers and Google+

I have a google+ account, but don’t check it very often. There seems to be a significant amount of noise on the feeds and trying to keep up with all the people who added me to circles was driving all the real mail out of my gmail inbox.
This morning I realized the noise just got louder. It seems spammers are buying very, very old lists scraped from usenet and inviting everyone on those lists to join them on Google+. Yup, an address of mine that has not been used in 7 or 8 years and is not very publicly associated with me got a Google+ invite from someone I’ve never heard of before.
I know there have been a lot of complaints about spammers abusing Google+. I thought it was possible, but I didn’t realize they were actually purchasing email lists to load into Google and spam people.

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December 2014: The month in email

2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit, which looks at what this new email client portends for both consumers and email marketers, and M3AAWG Recommends TLS, which reviews M3AAWG’s recommendation that mailbox providers phase out SSL encryption in favor of TLS. Look for more smart insights from Josh in 2015.
Steve contributed a post on the proper syntax for displaying a friendly email address, and a very helpful guide for generating useful test data that doesn’t compromise personally identifiable information from your actual customer data. He also detailed the brief DBL false positive from Spamhaus’ new “Abused-Legit” sub-zone and best practices for handling unrecognized responses.
I wrote about some of the subtleties inherent in how brands decide to “converse” with customers in email and other channels. We’ll just keep saying it: companies need to respect the inbox as personal space. I want to thank both Steve and Josh for picking up my slack on blogging. 7+ years is a long time to try and say new things on the blog and I needed a bit of a break.

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