News

Google catches itself spamming

Spam collection is, of course, a black art. And Google's mail service is pretty good at blocking spam... I haven't seen an offer of a permanent 3-6 in (whatever that is) for months. So I was a bit puzzled to find my spam collection included quite a few legitimate items.

In particular, quite a few wrongly blacklisted items were from people who normally are allowed through. Mostly, PR companies sending odd press releases. Irritating thought some of these are, they are required.

Normally, you don't moan. Heck, the sheer volume of rubbish is enormous, and the odd mis-diagnosis is part of the game. And with Google, sorting the false positives out is a lot easier than with some; you search through the spam using Google's own tools, and bingo.

But today's crop did surprise me. I was looking for "luetooth" because (well, duh...) I write about it. And there, together with an RSS feed from PC Mag was the one shown [picture, right] as "Google Alerts.

Yup... Google has blacklisted itself. (Click on image for larger version).