Google's tolerance of spam

[Paul Boddie]

On 13 Nov, 23:03, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
wrote:
>
> Their messages are an abuse of Google Groups's terms of service, and
> Google will likely act on complaints that include a *full* copy of the
> offending message.

Unless things have changed recently, I doubt that Google can be
bothered to do anything about such spam, even stuff apparently
originating from GMail. I used to flag a lot of messages as spam, and
on the occasions when the spam report form actually worked, it didn't
seem to have much of a subsequent effect on the ability of the
spammers to send the same tired nonsense to the group over and over
again. (Either newsgroups and Google groups are just write-only
channels for these idiots, or they take the classic Usenet approach of
"playing" in non-political/off-topic groups, knowing that their low-
end debate wouldn't stand five seconds of scrutiny in an appropriate
forum with people actually interested to read and respond to such
nonsense.)

Anyway, for Google it's a problem that's probably less serious than
having people "gaming" Adwords (or whatever Google's advertising
system is called): unless there's a financial impact on Google,
they're inclined to look the other way even if other people are
clearly getting a bad deal (from what I've read of various advertising
scams, at least).

Paul