Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention

Posted by Soulskill on from the click-here-to-report-as-spam dept.

CNet has a story about the security measures Google employs to protect their email systems and fight the never-ending war on spam. Their Postini team, acquired two years ago, has a variety of monitoring tools and automated response systems to find and block undesirable messages. Quoting: "The system scores each message on numerous combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and customer spam reports. ... To block fresh spam attacks not covered by existing heuristic technologies and viruses not covered by existing signature databases Postini relies on proprietary Zero-Hour technology to identify new outbreaks that show up in the traffic patterns and quarantine them for later rescanning. Customers can also create and build out their own white lists of message senders they trust and blacklist others they don't trust. It takes an average of 150 milliseconds for a message to be scanned by the antivirus engines that Postini licenses from McAfee and Authentium.

2 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't care how they do it.. by hansraj · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pfft.. the internet became sentient sometime ago and used to babble like a baby. Since whatever it said was pretty much garbage, it was impossible for anyone to correctly figure out whether the noise was the baby's (spam) or from the tv (non-spam?). Now that the internet speaks more coherently it is far more easier for Google to figure out stuff that is coming from the internet - spam that is. It is rather obvious actually.

    I wonder why yahoo has a miserable spam filter though; maybe Yahoo is like the careless parent who never gave a shit to figure out when the baby stopped babbling. And judging by the kind of spam I get in my hotmail box (it is all from microsoft), probably MS would be like those parents who insist on babbling themselves when the baby is around.

    There, mystery solved! Now no one has to RTFA. Now if only someone made this into a car analogy for the greater good.

  2. Re:Don't care how they do it.. by Threni · · Score: 3, Informative

    I get loads more spam than I used to. Something broke in Google's spam prevention about 4 months or so ago, and it's not been fixed yet. I redirect my email to my phone, where I get a notification of new email, and I've had to turn the sound and vibrate alert off because I got too much spam coming through.