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Friday, February 24, 2006

How Spammers Can Abuse Google Pages

In the future, the following query in Google might return quite a few pages:

site:pagetastic.com | site:googlepages.com

It returns all indexed pages created with the new Google Page Creator tool. The thing is, your sub-domain – e.g. john.doe.googlepages.com – will always be your Gmail address. And spammers, as we know, like nothing better than to get a lot of email addresses to send their spam too. Soon, they’ll have another way to harvest those addresses.

The good thing is, Gmail’s spam filter works fairly well and might even work better if a lot of Gmail addresses are being spammed at the same time. Already, I’m publishing my Gmail address everywhere and don’t have a real spam problem (I delete dozens of spam mails everyday, but it was worse with other email clients/ spam protection systems). Some on the other hand make it a point to not reveal their email address, as they don’t want any spam at all – and this might now make them stay away from the Page Creator.

[Thanks Travis Harris and Nir.]

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