Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo! has recently introduced a revolutionary set of tools which the search portal claims will help restrict spam on its Webmail service, developed in association with start-up Abaca, and has begun using Return Path technology to let companies know when and why their legitimate e-mail is being blocked.
The company’s “anti-spam czar” Mark Risher in a blog post on Tuesday offered valuable details on some of the new safeguards that the company is putting into place.
He also outlined some other efforts applied to cut down on spam, “At Yahoo, we take spam seriously,” wrote Risher.
It is an extremely large challenge and the bad guys are at all times out there trying to make a buck with their scams, but we are committed to helping keep you safer online, his post stated.
“One way we are turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’’s anti-spam team has been using a supercomputer consisting of thousands of individual PCs — part of our open source Hadoop project — to help detect spammers. We have teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage.”
The addition is also intended to allow commercial senders to keep a stringent check, in real-time, when Yahoo Mail users report their emails as spam. This feedback data gives commercial email senders the ability to identify the messages users are complaining about and better understand why recipients are marking their mail as spam.
With this handy information, senders can sort out the problems that are causing the complaints, improving their own email delivery rate while reducing spam complaints.
Risher also encouraged Yahoo Mail users to use the “Spam” and “Not Spam” buttons on Yahoo Mail to help Yahoo correct errors when spam is not filtered out or legitimate e-mail is. “Clicking those buttons sends an immediate and powerful signal to our systems (and to me) so that we can quickly try to correct the problem,” he said.
ReturnPath now offers email feedback loops for more than 60% of the largest internet service providers, including Comcast, Cox, USA.net, and Mailtrust.
Amongst the tools is a computing cluster which employs the company’s Hadoop distributed computing system. The cluster includes thousands of individual systems and is used to detect and filter out spam, according to Risher.
Risher also mentioned a number of projects the company is undertaking with outside firms. Startup Abaca is working with the company on new behavior-analysis tools to block spam messages, while email specialist ReturnPath is being tapped for a new service designed to remove false positives within spam filters.
The enhancement and redesigning of Mail, quite certainly one of the best known services offered by the company, has been one of the main focuses for the company’s ongoing efforts to rebuild itself in order to better face its current financial difficulties: early last year, Jerry Yang, then chief executive, unveiled an updated mail service at the centre of a new web strategy, while in December the company rolled out further changes to the service when it announced a plan to open Yahoo Mail to third party developers.
Currently, one of the most widespread applications to achieve an efficient spam filtering is the so-called “Bayesian filter,” in which every word or phrase contained in a e-mail message is associated to the probability of the message consisting in unwanted mail. For instance, a message containing the words “replica watches,” “cheap rolex” or “enhancement” in its subject or body is very likely to be a spam message.