Google has started automatically blocking emails sent by bulk senders who don’t meet stricter spam thresholds and authenticate their messages as required by new guidelines to strengthen defenses against spam and phishing attacks.
As announced in October, the company now requires those who want to dispatch over 5,000 messages daily to Gmail accounts to set up SPF/DKIM and DMARC email authentication for their domains.
Easy to acquire, yes, but not anonymously. The cert has to tie back to a domain or subdomain and there’s a process to prove a domain belongs to whomever requested the cert. Long story short, if you wanted to sue or file complaint against a spammer that signs their emails then it’s not really a challenge to trace back to the person or company doing the spamming.
This still relies on domain name registrars, hosts (e.g. Gmail), and certificate authorities keeping proper records.
Not sure about that. Phishing scams make sure to hide their identity really well and while something like .com might require your personal information, I can imagine .ru allowing anonymous registration. Once you’ve got a domain, getting a certificate for it with Let’s Encrypt happen in seconds with no personal information iirc. Even if you’d need to disclose something, you could just lie. Let’s Encrypt is highly automatized and I doubt anyone would check the information for some random domain. Yeah that cert/domain will be taken down quickly, but they’re incredibly cheap and easy to create.