Spammers have unfortunately become a part of our online lives. Whether you're a public figure or a common man, if any of your social media profiles is public, we're sure you would have been a victim of spamming some way or another. Of course, when you're a public figure, the degree of spamming is to another level altogether.

Online merchants all over the world have recently been victim to one such spamming activity. According to them, in the recent past, they have been seeing a humongous increase in the usage of their subscription boxes and contact forms all coming from a myriad of IP addresses having origination in the Indian sub-continent.

While some of them despised this as them being more popular in India than any other part of the world, others decided to dig deeper. After a careful with examination of the situation, one of the online merchants realised that all these email addresses were using Google's Gmail account. While anyone around the world can easily fill out a form, using a Gmail email address that wasn't real, what was interesting was the fact that almost half of these accounts had to follow the DOUBLE-OPT IN process in order to complete the registration for an email newsletter. This meant, the Gmail addresses must have had someone on the other end who is clicking on the confirmation link to complete the registration process.

A number of list hosts have acknowledged that this spamming is indeed a widespread problem, affecting a huge number of publishers all around the world. In addition to this, they have also pointed out to the fact that a large number of these emails had been opened, meaning a bot attack as a culprit was out of question. This was a work of a large network of Gmail accounts created in order to spam the websites.

While Google has been made aware of the situation, there hasn't been a concrete reply from the tech giant till date. The biggest irony in the entire matter is the fact that a number of online publishers consider Gmail as one of the most problematic services when it comes down to getting their DOUBLE-OPT IN emails to legitimate subscribers. Gmail ends up segregating their emails and sticking them into spam and promotional folders, making it almost virtually impossible for the communication to reach the user.

We guess, in the effort to keep its Gmail users away from spammers, Google forgot about taking care of the amount of spamming coming from their own Gmail users. It's time for Google to acknowledge this problem and find a solution to fix it as soon as possible.

[Top Image - rmnoa357 / Shutterstock.com]
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