Google Pages Allows GMail Email Harvesting
Google has newly introduced Google Pages which allows you to create your webpages with AJAX interface (Web 2.0?) . It is quite a slick product, provides 100MB of space, file uploading etc. However it also exposes your GMail email address (which it requires for signup) to be harvested by spammers.
Google Pages creates your home page with the following structure (example):
Email.Address.googlepages.com
A simple Google query exposes all the email addresses of the Google Pages creators, which can be trivially harvested by any robots or humans.
My advice on Google Pages - stay away from it or create with a junk GMail address, unless you love spam.
Update: I found prior discussion of this issue on Outer Court blog.
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February 27th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
I’m not sure that it’s really going to matter. Google GMail has the best SPAM elimination in the world right now. I never receive any SPAM so it wouldn’t really matter if someone had my GMail address.
February 28th, 2006 at 10:58 am
[...] There are three minor problems for me. One, I can’t stop Google from indexing my pages. That is really annoying. So, don’t put a ton of personal stuff on you page. The second problem is that, as you can see here and here, it can give you spam. (A spam ticker is at http://arbyntest.googlepages.com/home). But, Geocities does the same thing for Yahoo! users (you name is geocities.com/yahoo email address here). The third is that it doesn’t integrate with any other Google products (yet). So, Picasa and Hello won’t upload to Google Pages, and Blogger won’t post to Google Pages either. But, I’m sure these services will soon be tweaked to fix that. [...]
February 28th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I have seen false positives with Google spam protection as well as spam which creeped in. Also it filters out zipped files etc. I wouldn’t rate it very highly.
In any case no spam protection system can justify exposing email addresses to add to the already massive spam problem.
All they need(ed) to do is to just allow users to choose their webpage name prefix like blogger.com service.
November 16th, 2006 at 10:48 am
As of yet, I don’t see any way that harvesters could grab more than one address at a time, manual style. Not sure if google pages should be the focus of the spam battle.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Googlepages allow you to create up to two “fake” web addresses (which are unrelated to your email address). I am actually a fake address that leaks no information about my email.