How Gmail Blocks Spam

[Jared Moya]

I dont how many of you out there have switched up to GMail but I did a long ago and Ive never been happier. Hotmail became so riddled with spam that I had to create layered fake accounts to filter out the crud.

With GMail I rarely get any spam at all, maybe 2 a weeks tops these days.

Anyways, this guy has a cool story about how it works and a dandy video to boot.

While Gmail doesn't filters all the spam messages that could reach your inbox, it certainly does a better job than other webmail apps like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Gmail's filters are constantly improving and an important ingredient of their effectiveness is the use of community signals. Every time you click on the "Mark as spam" button, Gmail uses that information to block similar future messages not only for you, but for all Gmail users. But spam is also evolving and it's harder to block, especially when it uses images and literary texts.

"Many Google teams provide pieces of the spam-protection puzzle, from distributed computing to language detection. For example, we use optical character recognition (OCR) developed by the Google Book Search team to protect Gmail users from image spam. And machine-learning algorithms developed to merge and rank large sets of Google search results allow us to combine hundreds of factors to classify spam," explains Google. "Gmail supports multiple authentication systems, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DomainKeys, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), so we can be more certain that your mail is from who it says it's from. Also, unlike many other providers that automatically let through all mail from certain senders, making it possible for their messages to bypass spam filters, Gmail puts all senders through the same rigorous checks."


The spam in Gmail is also the subject of a promotional video that encourages to use Gmail if you want to "get back your time". The video reminded me of an old email account from my ISP: it received so much spam that it was almost impossible to find the genuine mail and the 10 MB of storage were insufficient to collect all this junk.

[Hath]

Wow, Google is pretty thourough when it comes to blocking spam!

[randomguy132]

Very enjoyable video.

[-0-BACKLASH-0-]

for some reason I get more than that. I don't know how it started. I prolly get one or two every other day or so. I just go in and trash them.

[robincheema]

i have like 150 spam messages in my spam box... i never seem to find a delete button... but anyways my email is like 3 years old so i don't really care..

[mountain_rage]

I have 2 emails I use for websites that I think are going to send me spam, one is for might send me spam, that goes to gmail and the other is most definitely will spam me, that goes to yahoo. Why do I separate them? Well the gmail one gets forwarded to my main account. The gmail one I very rarely get spam and does a great job, Yahoo I can't say the same thing. I can actively tell it to block some spam by keywords that are always in certain messages I get and yet it still does not block them. So currently as it stands gmail is doing a much better job then its competitors.