Post by John LevinePost by George NeunerLynn
You mean the spam floods that Google openly condones and possibly also
facilitates in order to promote its own group services?
I think you vastly overestimate how much anyone at Google cares about Groups.
The whole thing has been on autopilot for years, it can't possibly be making
them enough money to deal with the hassle.
Maybe. But remember that Google trades in eyeballs ... the money, in
some sense, is secondary.
"group" is overloaded.
Google Groups (GG) is a unified interface that provides access to
Usenet, public mailing lists, and to Google's own group services.
But there is a substantial difference: Google offers spam filtering to
its own groups, while denying it to others.
Post by John LevineFWIW I get plenty of spam directly from Groups when people yet again load
up a spam list and blast out mail in languages I cannot read.
Sure it can happen.
GG's spam filtering has to be opted into by the group administrator.
However, there is no way provided for an outside group to do that, so
even those non-Google Usenet groups and mailing lists that /have/
living administrators have no way to opt into Google's spam filtering.
Also, my experience with GG has been that its spam filtering only
checks posts made via email (the "list" interface). It seems that
posts made directly via the web UI are checked only for abusive
language (and then only in English), and once accepted they can be
removed only by the group adminstrator or via user complaints.
The major point here is that Google provides (some semblence of) spam
filtering - but only for its own groups.
YMMV.