Google contribution to the world of spam

Thu, 16 March 2006

I just came accross a discussion on Digital Point forums about how Google did something rather stupid and helped spammers get hold of thousands of gmail addresses.

A little while ago Google released a new service - Google Pages. Very simple and very cool (for some) stuff but therein is the problem. If your gmail address is somename@gmail.com then your Google Pages url will be http://somename.googlepages.com

Handy, eh ? Of course, but even handier for spammers to harvest google and spam its very own users. Open Google and in the search field eneter site:~.googlepages.com and watch thousands of Gmail usernames right in front of your eyes.

I’m not a programmer but I think it’s very easy to write a script that will harvest all those links and then replace .googlepages.com with @gmail.com The rest is called - spam.

When google pages was released, like any other human being I went to see what it is, created one page website and decided to forget about it as it wasn’t something I’d be interested in, rather for my dad, should he ever decide to have an online presence.

So, after I figured out that this might get me something for free, namely free and unlimited spam, I decided to go and remove my ‘googlepage’ but there is no option to kill it. You can ‘unpublish’ all pages but the url will still remain there with the generic page saying: Sorry, but that beautiful web page you’re looking for isn’t here yet. Stay tuned! Argh !

So before you decide to have your own googlepages.com page, I’d recommend create another gmail account and use that username for your googlepages and if you like - for spam analysis.

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