Google's Malware Filter Error also Affected Gmail

Because of an error in the malware filters, Google not only flagged all the websites on the Internet, including Google.com, as being malicious, but also cataloged valid emails as spam. The past Saturday, because of an incorrect labeling of the URL of '/' as a value to the file, Google associated the following message with all the results returned to queries through its search engine:“this site may harm your computer." However, the implemental problem with Google's malware filters alto took its toll on Gmail.

“Gmail's spam engine uses those filters (among hundreds of other signals) to help protect our users from malware, and so between 6:00 a.m. PST and 8:00 a.m. PST, we mistakenly sent some legitimate mail to people's spam folders,” Brad Taylor, software engineer, said at the end of the past week indicating that Google was looking to build and “roll out an automated fix to put these legitimate messages back into your inboxes, and we expect this to happen within a day. In the meantime, if you were expecting a critical message this morning, please check your spam folder. (We tune our spam filters well enough that ordinarily you should never have to check your spam folder.) We're very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Google caught the issues relatively fast, and identified the source rapidly reverting back to an error-free list with malicious websites from StopBadware.org. According to the Mountain View-search giant, users could only be returned the erroneous "this site may harm your computer" for 40 minutes on Saturday. As of February 2, 2009, Google has also dealt with the issues in Gmail.

“We've rolled out a fix that has restored these messages to most people's inboxes, though to be on the safe side we'd still recommend that you check your spam folder if there was a critical message you expected to receive between 6am and 8am PST on Saturday,” Taylor stated.