Google Apps Gets Anti-Spam Tool

Google has enabled a new anti-spam feature for all Google Apps customers, which the company said could help those customers make sure their outgoing emails aren’t labelled as spam by their intended recipients.

Google said its Google Apps is the first major email platform to provide DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing at no extra cost.

Anti-spam tool

“We’re making it possible for all Google Apps customers to sign their outgoing messages with DKIM, so their sent mail is less likely to get caught up in recipients’ spam filters,” said Google enterprise product manager Adam Dawes, in a blog post last week.

Gmail has supported email-signing standards such as DomainKeys and DKIM since its launch in 2004, Dawes said.

He said email authentication can help verify senders’ identities and give users a tool to recognise potential spam messages.

“Many mail systems can display whether a received message is DKIM-verified, which helps spam filters verify and assess the overall reputation of the sender’s domain: messages from untrusted senders are treated more sceptically than those from good senders,” Dawes wrote.

Google Apps administrators can enable DKIM signing in the ‘Advanced Tools’ tab of the control panel, he said.

Spam in the UK

In October Spam Ratings found that UK web users are living in one of the most dangerous places in the world to surf, with 1,000 spam sharks each averaging five dangerous attacks per day.

This figure came from Spam Ratings’ study of over 10,000 websites and 150,000 emails. The company has noted that malicious spam messaging had doubled in the past year and one in 10 UK websites are now responsible for malicious or dangerous spamming attacks.