From: www.itworld.com

Google Mail Servers Allowing Backscatter

by AllSpammedUp.com

October 7, 2008 —

According to Slashdot, Google’s mail servers appear to be responsible for sending large amounts of backscatter. They don’t perform any recipient validation for the googlegroups and blogger.com domains (and presumably their other domains as well), allowing spammers to launch large-scale dictionary attacks against them using forged headers and envelope sender addresses. This results in the owners of those forged addresses getting huge amounts of bounce messages when the spam hits non-existent users on Google’s domains. Most correctly set up mail servers don’t generate such bounce messages. Tell that to Google’s mail server! Botnets love mail servers like this and will go to town on them, commencing an unrelenting barrage of spam.

Most ISPs won’t hesitate to place a block on any IP that receives complaints of backscatter, and that can cause big headaches for innocent people. There are even reports of businesses having entire mail servers wiped out due to backscatter. Read the rest of this article>>