Google fixes spam bug in Gmail

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Google fixes problem in its classification system

By Juan Carlos Perez | Miami | Monday, 22 September, 2008

Gmail users may have noticed a recent spike in spam clogging their inbox, but Google says it has fixed the problem.

For the second time in as many months Gmail users saw a sudden increase in spam, and they reported the issue in the Webmail service's official discussion forum in recent days.

On Thursday, a Google employee named Sarah chimed in by posting to the main thread devoted to this topic to say that the complaints were well-founded and had pointed Google toward a solution.

"Sorry to hear that this problem returned. Thanks to your reports, we were able to find and fix a problem in our classification system. Please let me know if you continue to experience this issue," she wrote.

Gmail is used by tens of millions of people worldwide for both personal communications and, as part of the Google Apps hosted productivity and collaboration suite, for work.

Gmail suffered three outages last month, prompting Google to extend a credit to users of the Premier version of Apps, which costs US$50 per user per year and has a "99.9 percent" uptime guarantee for the Webmail service.

Google also vowed to improve its problem-notification methods to better communicate with its Apps Premier customers.