Anyway, this particular service will also monitor other IPs that don’t even belong to MailChimp, even though I never told it to (long story). An interesting side effect to that feature is that I got an alert today telling me that one of Google’s email servers is on the SORBS blacklist, for sending email to a spam trap (learn what a spam trap is, and how to keep them off your list).

Here’s a screenshot (click to zoom):

Ouch. My guess is one of their users sent an email to a very, very, very old email address that’s been turned into a spam trap. Or, a spammer hacked into Gmail (see article below) and sent spam to a huge list tainted with spam traps.

The lesson here is that if Google is vulnerable to blacklisting, anybody is. Do you know if your list is vulnerable? Here’s a guide to help you find out.

On a related note, Ars Technica reports: Gmail being throttled, blocked by some anti-spam vendors