Help improve the Gmail spam filters

Jul 20, 2007 07:13 GMT  ·  By

Gmail is described as the most efficient anti-spam email solution and there is no doubt it is really a well-developed product. Gmail has several filters able to block unwanted messages delivered into your inbox but sometimes it's not enough to assure a 100 percent protected account. Take the example of the numerous messages that managed to bypass the filters and invaded the inbox. However, the Mountain View company is the proud owner of Gmail and tries to do anything it's possible to improve it. That's why Brad Taylor, Software Engineer, encourages users to use the "Report Spam" and the "Not Spam" button in order to help the company flag or avoid flagging as spam some of the messages delivered through the entire Gmail network.

If you didn't know, the spam filters are based on a huge community that is continuously flagging received messages as spam and helping the service keep other users protected. For example, if you flag one of the messages delivered into your inbox as spam, the technology searches for reports sent by other consumers. If they exist, the email address is automatically blacklisted and every new message sent by that certain address is redirected to the spam folder.

"It helps you personally. It gets the spam out of your Inbox and keeps what is truly spam separate from any non-spam messages you just want to delete. We keep statistics on which senders you've flagged as spammers (and which you've marked as non-spammers), and we use this information to provide you a better, personalized Gmail spam filter that overrides the system-wide filter when appropriate," the Google employee wrote today.

Gmail was released a long time ago in April 2004 and since then, it grew up a lot, evolving from the product that offers the largest storage size to the most efficient anti-spam solution able to assure a safe email communication experience.