Spammers start using Google Docs

About two weeks ago, the anti-spam company MessageLabs discovered that spammers began using (more precisely, testing) the Google Docs online service to publish their messages. The document publishing system built into Google Docs is not bad for sending spam. If you want to make your document public, then you click the “Share” button and enter the email addresses of all users to whom invitations are sent. In fact, it is a built-in spam engine.

Chief Technology Specialist MessageLabs explains in detail the reasons for this interesting phenomenon. Firstly, in this way spammers nullify the chances of being banned. No one can add a blacklist link to docs.google.com. Secondly, Google servers work perfectly, so that when users are “serviced”, web pages load as quickly as possible, and there is no need to pay for hosting.

Of course, Google initially provided for the possibility of sending spam from Google Docs, so at the bottom of each invitation there is a “Report Spam” link. True, with massive simultaneous complaints, the newsletter does not automatically stop. Google has been known to deal with such complaints for quite some time. Obviously, they are considered manually. At least, the spam document found a few weeks after the complaint from MessageLabs has not yet been removed and is in the public domain. Although, on the other hand, the publication of spam is not a violation, in contrast to the sending of illegitimate emails, but Google is also very slowly solving problems with spam email addresses.