Google Apologizes for Accidental Spam

Written by Sue Walsh on February 15, 2011

A red-faced Google was forced to issue an apology to some of its users after a misconfigured internal group sent them a flood of unsolicited messages.

The embarrassing event began when a user came upon a group created for testers of the company’s CR-48 laptop. The group hadn’t been used yet and it’s unknown why the user took it upon him/herself to start posting, but their choice to do so started an avalanche of emails and members of the group found their inboxes flooded with over 100 messages in the span of a few hours. In their apology Google explained they had accidentally configured the group to send a copy of every post made to every subscriber:

Earlier this morning, you may have received a large number of emails from chrome-notebook-pilot-users@googlegroups.com regarding the Chrome notebook Pilot program user forum. We apologize for this inconvenience, and you will not receive any more messages from this address. Instructions for deleting these messages are at the end of this email.

What happened? We planned to launch our Chrome Notebook Pilot forum next week to all users who had been selected for the Pilot program. Last night, around midnight Pacific time, a user discovered this forum and posted a message. Unfortunately, we had misconfigured this forum to email every post to every member. Thus, the first post started an avalanche of responses. Some messages were unsubscribe requests, others were thoughtful comments or questions, but all of them were emailed to every user. We have since deleted this group.

The flood of messages contained what you’d expect from such an event. Many profanity laden tirades and “unsubscribe me!” demands, some posts expressing simple curiosity, and some actual discussion. This is an excellent reminder of what can result from a misconfigured mailing list!

Comments

Charlie Mann February 24, 2011

This is the ultimate problem. How can you trust Google to keep your e-mail safe from spam when it does the same thing?! That mega company should try to discipline some of its employees. They’re doing something really nasty.

David Sanders February 24, 2011

As bad as this made Google look, it’s an obvious mistake (gasp! Even mega-companies make them!) and Google has apologized for it. I’ve always been impressed by the spam filter implemented in Gmail. It simply works, so good for Google for keeping my inbox spam-free these past 5 years!
With reference to this article; has anyone been chosen for the Chrome Notebook pilot? I applied a few months ago and am still hopeful :P

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