Gmail can be used as “Spam Bazooka”
INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has sucessfully created a proof of concept exploiting the “trust hierarchy” that exists between mail service providers. Taking advantage of the way Gmail forwards messages, the team was able to send 4000 messages in a short period of time from a single account without any countermeasures taken by Google.
Using Google as an open email relay is highly desierable for spammers because Gmail is trusted by most email providers — making messages sent though Gmail immune to most spam filtering.
