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Google for Domains and Image Spam

November 7, 2006
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Url: https://www.google.com/a/

I have been complaining and discussion image spam (spam e-mail where most of the body is an ad for a stock, medication or other ridiculous product) on some of my favorite mailing lists.  In the past few months it has gotten really bad. I’ve used SpamBayes to rid myself of spam the last few years and it works great…until Image Spam.

That’s where Google for Domains came in. At the behest of a number of people (including Steve Johnson, Shawn Van Ness, and Curt Hagenlocher) I moved my domain to Google’s GMail for domains.  I now have all of my mail at wildermuth.com hosted by Google.  So far I am very impressed.  Not a single piece of image spam has gotten through. Over the past 2 days no false positives.

I am using it as my mail provider, so my working pattern of using Outlook has not changed at all (POP/SMTP supports seems to be pretty good). The spam collection is so good that I’ve actually had to go out to Google a couple of times to make sure I was getting mail correctly. I was so used to getting lots of spam that with only 20 pieces of spam (none of them image spam) that fell through their filters, SpamBayes did a great job of cleaning up the little that snuck through.

My suspicion is that since they are such a big provider of mail that they are getting lots of human feedback as to what is and what is not spam so as to improve the spam cleasing.