Peter N. M. Hansteen asks the question, "Does Your Email Provider Know What A "Joejob" Is?" in his blog and provides some data and discussion. He provides anecdotal evidence which seems to indicate that Google and possibly other mail service providers are either quite ignorant of history when it comes to email and spam, or are applying unsavory tactics to capture market dominance.
[Ed Note: I had to look up "joe job" to find out what it is. According to wikipedia:
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them (see also e-mail spoofing), but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday April 25 2016, @04:13AM
While I'm certain that some users of all those services are also users of PGP/GPG, I'm not aware of anything those services do to facilitate or encourage the use of PGP or GPG. None of the pages you've linked contain the terms "PGP" nor "GPG." I don't think I'm mistaken in assuming that the users of that software are, globally, a small minority of the people who use e-mail.
The grandparent post asserted:
I thought it obvious that my response alluded to that bit. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @05:25AM
Even if you were not being disingenuous about PGP, the fact remains that a joe-jobber is NOT free to send messages to any of those email services because his messages will be tagged as spam or even routed straight to /dev/null before any PGP signatures are even parsed.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday April 25 2016, @08:02AM
LOL, in what way might I be "disingenuous about PGP," pray tell?
"Attempt to send," then, if you prefer. A spammer can attempt to send messages to any e-mail address in the world, as well as nonexistent ones. Spammers exchange lists comprising millions of addresses. There are plenty of mail servers in the world that, when they identify a message as spam or malware, or as having an invalid recipient, will send a DSN (often including the original message) to the address on its "To:" line. Get joe-jobbed, and your mailbox will be deluged with crap. You got all your correspondents to use Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL? Great, and do those services keep you from seeing DSNs from other e-mail providers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @11:45AM
> LOL, in what way might I be "disingenuous about PGP," pray tell?
>
> "Attempt to send," then, if you prefer. A spammer can attempt to send messages to any e-mail address in the world,
Same way you are being disingenuous now. What an utterly meaningless, goal-post moving restatement.
But whatever it takes to make you feel like you weren't just being a snarky idiot, right?
Did you know how apropos your username was when you picked it?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday April 25 2016, @03:43PM
Not at all. I was simply offering a clarification. You prefer to misunderstand, fine.