Google claims that at the moment 99.9 percent of all spam is kept away from the Gmail inbox of its users and this is because the tech giant uses artificial intelligence to look through the billions of emails and remove the phishing attacks and unwanted mail.
Gmail would probably be unusable if Google weren’t doing anything in its power to keep out spam. Kaspersky, the popular security firm said that 59.2 percent of the entire email it blocked in the beginning of 2015 was just spam. The senders of these emails were using new domains like science and work in order to get past the spam filters and advertise or send out malware.
From the beginning of Gmail, Google used machine learning in order to upgrade the spam filter, and relied on the 900 million users it has to mark the messages as spam by using the buttons “not spam” and “report spam”. However, people who use Gmail still have to click the “not spam” button from time to time, which means that those users have to go through the entire spam folder in order to reach an email that is actually relevant but was somehow flagged as being spam. A good example for this is a monthly statement from a person’s bank.
In order to address this issue Google upgrades its spam tools and is releasing a new technology named Gmail Postmaster Tool which will allow companies that send out numerous emails to examine delivery errors data, reputation and spam reports. Even though the new spam tool is intended for companies, users will also benefit from it as they won’t be forced to search through enormous amounts of spam emails in order to reach a relevant message. Or as Google put it: “no more dumpster diving”.
Other than these new spam tools, Google also revealed how the artificial neural network, which drives other services such as Google Now and Google Search, is aiding in dealing with the more sneakier of spam emails. Google doesn’t give out exact information about how effective the system is at uncovering phishing emails but the company said that it is the best when it comes to unveiling impersonating email.
Google said that because the system is learning, Gmail is able to find out if the message you receive is actually from that person or not and can keep you safe from fake emails. On top of this, Google is using the technology in the spam filter to better understand the different tastes of the users on Gmail.
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