Monday, February 2, 2009

Nobody's Perfect (not even Google)

In a rolling perfect storm of errors, in one day Google marked all websites as bad 

and, in conjunction with that marked all mail as spam.


Being in the business, I feel for them, as it was a regular update gone awry that caused the problem. I am sure no one in that group slept over the weekend. I think we don't realize how good all this spam and Malware blocking is. The state of the art has gotten so good that we all take it for granted. I certainly do. When the defenses come down, the continuous barrage of junk becomes apparent to us (to our dismay). 


In my own moment of insanity, I tried shutting down our own internal spam filters for one day only, to experience the pain. Unfortunately, I quickly shut the experiment down after only one hour when I discovered that no one at Maysoft.com was particularly fond of feeling the pain or receiving all of their spam. Where is their sense of adventure?

11:00 AM and we're off...the "World Without Spam Filters" test begins

11:21 AM
21 minutes into the test, my Lotus Notes Inbox is being flooded. Here is a snapshot:

11:38 AM
Blackberry users are complaining about the spam. Allison Cote wants to know what is happening. She had to leave her Blackberry and delete a bunch of messages from her Inbox. My test is distracting her, and others, from their work.

11:42 AM
I am checking mail1.box and mail2.box. There are 3,341 messages in one, and about the same number in the other. The router is going crazy trying to send some of these back to the senders as delivery failure reports. Aaaargh... this is worse than I thought.

11:46 AM I have to stop this test early. The amount of pain everywhere is too much. I am turning on the SMTP mail filter now as the only prudent course of action. 

(Read about the full text at A World Without Spam Filters)



Google did for the entire world what I could only do for people internally: Re-awaken them to the value and necessity of a good spam filter.






Official Google Blog: "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?!

Official Google Blog: "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?!