In my situation some punk decided to forward me every single bloody thing that gets sent to his gmail account. I don't know why. I don't know this person, have never met him in my life, and get absolutely no response when I email him to ask to stop (except of course a copy of my own email back to me again).

So I contacted Google support in the vague hope they could at least disable the forwarding, if not the entire account. Their response? In a nutshell: "This doesn't go against our Terms of Use, contact the user yourself, or just block email from his address" *

Excuse me? This isn't against their AUP?! Well infact I looked, and there is absolutely *nothing* in their terms to service that prohibits a gmail user from abusing that service. Instead of them resolving the issue, I have to instead take action myself and actively block this user. Even though this problem came about because of a short-sight in their application design.

The repercussions of this could be massive. If you really wanted to piss someone off, all you'd need to do is sign-up a free gmail.com account, register yourself to as many high-volume mailing lists as you feel like, and then forward the whole lot to some poor sod and Google will do absolutely nothing about it, because it doesn't "break their terms of use". With the 2.5GB mailbox and Google's servers at your disposal, the rogue gmail account could easily process thousands upon thousands of emails per day. Plenty more than most mail filtering packages could deal with

And don't forget folks, this is all perfectly allowed behaviour.

The most annoying fact of all is that it would only take ONE confirmation email, sent to that "forwarding" address, to stop this from ever happening. Ironically even if they added this feature (nay, requirement), it won't help me one bit.

* The Google gmail support reply in full:

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have
caused.

When we are notified of such issues, we investigate and take appropriate
action if we find that the Gmail Terms of Use have been violated. To read
the Gmail Terms of Use, please visit:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.html.

As an additional step, you may want to contact the owner of the  Gmail
account to point out an incorrect forwarding address.  You may also want
to consider blocking the unwanted messages from entering your email
account.

We appreciate your concern, and thank you for taking the time to send us
your comments.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team