Google Keeping the World Safe

That might seem a bit of an odd statement, Google is our favourite search tool - so how are they keeping us safe?

An article on the Google Blog lead me to a story in which Google is talking about a large increase in virus based e-mail attacks over the July period. I run my e-mail through Google and for the last few weeks it has been warning me about viruses in UPS and CNN spoof e-mails, so it caught my eye when I read about Google talking about just how it has dealt with those very attacks.

If you're interested to know how Google can deal with these threats, and how it can protect you from it, keep reading.

Google stand out from any other search engine, or rather any other large software firm. Google, as most would be well aware, have a love for expanding into new worlds and slowly but steadily trying to take over the world. I'm sure you're all familiar with Google Earth, or now Google Maps, Street View, etc

What you might not be aware of is the Google Apps packages. Google has a large set of applications it likes to experiment with, from Calendars, Document Files (including it's own browser-based Word and Spreadsheet apps) to entire website development kits - and I haven't even begun to mention it's entire set of random tools and experiments.

You're also probably aware of Google's e-mail solution - Gmail. The advantage with using packages like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc for e-mail is that they all receive massive amounts of e-mails every day and from there point of view spam stands out remarkably obvious. This therefore allows major e-mail providers to create spam filters that will exceed any ISP or Bayesian solution. But that's not helping small businesses, or people that want to use ISP or domain issues - until now.

Google has a recent development called Google Apps, which is free to use for most small-medium businesses. Google Apps will allow you to host your domains entire e-mail on Google servers, free to access via POP3, IMAP or the Gmail interface and take full advantage of their spam filters and anti-virus protection. Additionally if you have a single e-mail address with an ISP or other provider, you can also hook this up to any normal Gmail account and have that download your e-mails, check for spam and viruses and then be accessible via the Gmail interface, or of course POP3/IMAP.

These kind features from Google allow us to use personal and business e-mail's absolutely free and with the full power of Google's protection behind you, while still maintaining proper POP3/IMAP support.