Comments on: Harassment from a Gmail user

Google hides the source IP address of messages they send out and won't take complaints directly from harassment victims.

[Michichael]

Pointless blog is pointless?

Duh. How often do people get "harassed" anyway via e-mail and not use the handy "ignore" command. And if a person creates multiple accounts to e-mail, just shoot an e-mail over to [e-mail] about them spamming.

[pjk0]

Actually this has been one of key problems I've had with Gmail since the beginning. But people have been so ga-ga eyed about Gmail that they rarely listen to this sort of thing.

There are other privacy issues with Google products (cookie retention and internal database retention for search, as well as email data retention for Gmail) and as a result of global concern on this front they have twice reduced the timespan that they hold personally-identifiable information on users. It is not anyone's imagination.

[blsith]

Wait, you want them to keep track of who you should call for law enforcement? Call you local police's cyber crimes unit, give them the evidence and they will issue a subpoena to Google if necessary. If you got the IP address, what would you do with it? You'd go to the ISP that owns it and ask "who was this", and they'd give you ... amazingly... THE EXACT SAME RESPONSE. That data is part of customer records, and any decent ISP will require a legal document requesting the specific information in order to release who the person is. If your ISP does not follow that policy, I'd get a new ISP.