Is Google’s Better at Catching (and Ditching) Spam Gmail? Looks Like It
It looks like Google has figured out how to eliminate what we hate: spam email.
The company recently said that less than 0.1 percent of email in the average Gmail inbox is spam, while wanted mail in spam folders is under 0.05 percent.
“According to Google, it’s the result of using its artificial neural network to sift through billions of incoming emails to weed out unwanted messages and phishing attacks,” according to ZDNet.
Just consider this: Were Google not doing everything it could to weed out spam, Gmail would likely be an unusable mess.
“According to security firm Kaspersky, 59.2 percent of all email it filtered in the first quarter of 2015 was spam, with its senders jumping on newly-released domains, such as .work and .science, to sneak past spam filters and deliver advertisements or malware,” says ZDNet.
Reportedly, Google been using machine learning to improve its spam filter, relying on its 900 million users to flag up unwanted messages through the services “report spam” and “not spam” buttons.
“However, as it noted in a blog post today, users still occasionally have to click the “not spam” button, which essentially meant that they had to wade through their spam folder to find an email that was wanted, but flagged as spam — for example, a monthly statement alert from the bank,” noted ZDNet.
Google is said to be releasing a new system called Gmail Postmaster Tools. This will allow those companies that send email in bulk to analyze data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation.
