Former Yahoo engineer and blogger Andy Baio once pointed out “If you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignored, watch for spam taking over.” Google Groups, now infested with spam, fits the description. The mailing-list and discussion-board services have remained short on features since its start in 2001. The problem seems ridiculous considering Groups and Gmail are from the same company, but while Gmail can filter out spam and Groups does not have a clue.

“As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead” says John Resig, the lead developer of JQuery. Because of the overwhelming spam the JQuery mailing list, one of the most popular Google Groups with over 20,000 members, is leaving the service. Resig noted that while Groups is still usable for private mailing lists, its inability to stop spam, the insufficiency of moderator tools and general neglect have made it useless for large public mailing lists like JQuery.

The moderation does help, but as Resig points out, it makes joining and posting a complex affair for first-time users who arrive at the group seeking help. The quality of the tools provided for moderators are not up to “Google” standard as well. “The problem mostly lies in the cases that we’re trying to support,” Resig says in an e-mail to Webmonkey. “We need to support people who are actively trying to help new users, and we also need to support people who just want a simple question answered.” Considering spammers have realized that spoofing e-mail addresses works in Google Groups and with nothing done to stop them, the signs do not look good.