A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention

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.

damm

[omgarthas]

and now, where I am supposed to to get my weekly viagra supplies?

Postini may or may not work,

[Anonymous Coward]

but what I really want to tell you is that I've inherited a great deal of money and I need someone to help me transfer it to the US. I live in Nigeria. You all seem to be great gentleman, so I will pay appropiately.

Contact me.

better then their fishing 'algorithm'

[cliffski]

part of gmails phishing filter seems to do this

if(hyperlink in email ends in .exe)
{
    isphishing = true.
}

Even if this is an email from someone in your whitelist and is merely quoting text from your own message you sent them.
And there seems to be NO way to prevent a message with .exe in it to be marked this way :(

Toughest spam

[Pessimist+Cynic]

They can filter out the obvious spam mail, but some spammers are so clever and so well hung - because they've taken some DrMaxMan to acquire an enlarged sexual wand with which you can perform better and be bigger for f.r.e.e - that they can actually embed their spam offers inside real messages in such a way as to be completely undetectable by filters.

Re:Postini may or may not work,

[Anonymous Coward]

You all seem to be great gentleman

You must be new here.

Re:"Postini"?

[veganboyjosh]

I used to get Snopes candidates from my mother-in-law a few years ago. I used to delete them without saying anything. Then I figured I'd try to teach her about the internet, and trusting things you receive in your inbox. I made an effort to track down whatever outrageous story she forwarded on snopes or wherever else, so that she'd see they weren't true, and stop sending them.

Now, instead of getting emails from her with "I wonder if this is true. It sounds so amazing!", I get "I already checked Snopes, and while this one isn't real, it makes for a good story!" MLIA.

Re:Don't care how they do it..

[Anonymous Coward]

STOP! The internet is not really sentient (yet).

Am too!