Google has once again had to lock horns with Spamcop, the service which blocks unwanted e-mail on behalf of many mail service providers, following the blocking of several Gmail servers, leading to normal mail being rejected as spam.

Several minor incidents of "false positive" spam identification occurred last year, but this month, several Google servers have been blacked completely, shutting all users of those servers off from sending e-mail to any address monitored by Spamcop.

Google is attempting to deal with the matter diplomatically. It informed users: "Some organizations, like SpamCop and SORBS, keep track of email spam so email providers/ISPs can use it to prevent spam from being delivered to their users. Occasionally, Gmail is listed on SpamCop because we do not reveal the IP address of our users."