I think, by now, you are all familiar with Mark, our resident anti-spam czar. If not, Mark has graced this blog a number of times before. Most recently he conducted an anti-spam workshop in addition to letting us know how we’re cracking down Lottery scams on our corporate Yodel blog. Today, he’s back with more great news on how he and his team are working to keep you safer for 2009. So without further ado, here’s Mark….
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At Yahoo!, we take spam seriously. And as I’ve told you before, we’ve got some of the smartest computer scientists in the world working to ensure Yahoo! Mail users receive all the mail they want…and none that they don’t. It’s a huge challenge and the bad guys are always out there trying to make a buck with their scams, but we’re committed to helping keep you safer online.
One way we’re 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’re 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.
We’re also out there working with partners big and small to help reduce spam across the Internet. We’ve seen some promising early results from one such company, a startup named Abaca, and our hopes are high that together we can block even more of these messages by looking at spammers’ behavior in addition to the contents of their spammy messages.
Closely related to all of this is that we need to ensure the right messages still get through, that we don’t throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. With the help of our friends at Return Path, we’re relaunching our Complaint Feedback Loop for commercial e-mail companies. With the CFL, legitimate companies receive notification when users mark a message as “spam,” and those companies can then use that feedback to help them fix the problems on their end. For example, a company may have used a confusing subject line, or accidentally sent to the wrong mailing list; with the CFL, we can get that information to them so they can quickly correct the problem.
As always, I’ll close with a reminder that, if Yahoo! Mail does let something slip through into the wrong folder — either allowing spam into your inbox or mistakenly putting a good message in your Spam folder — please use the “Spam” and “Not Spam” buttons to let us know. 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. It’s the best way for us to get better, and to continue keeping your e-mail experience great!
Mark Risher,
Anti-Spam Czar
Yahoo’s spam filter seems to work mostly pretty good for me. Cashfiesta seems to be coming up a lot lately.
The one thing I wish Yahoo would do is let me create a rule to automatically delete emails that come in with dates in the future. I go through my spam folder once/week to make sure there isn’t anything I missed. It is annoying to have to seem 100+ emails with dates that are 1 week-40 years in the future. Let me automatically delete them!
For Larry H. ~
Thank you SO much for the information. You have told me more than ANYONE I know. I will check the addresses in my Spam folder, then add them to the ‘blocked’ file. I sure hope that will do it for all those SPAM letters. Here I was hoping that I WAS RICH, but….no such luck.. Oh well, I AM rich when it comes to having good friends and e-friends like you all. Thank you, again. You are most kind, and definately a Gentleman!
LindaCarol
I’d like to know what happened. Until about 10 days ago I was getting 120 emails per day into my Spam folder, and only about 1 in my Inbox. Suddenly I am getting 20 – 40 spam per day in my Inbox. Is this the new technology at work?
I’ve seen an order-of-magnitude increase in spam in the last week. I’ve had the yahoo
email account since 2000 and maybe 1-2 spams per week were getting past the filter.
Sometime about a week ago it increased to about 7 per day. The ads are mostly for
some online pharmacy (many with the word viagra) but are each from different
originating email addresses.
I’ve had my main Yahoo account for about 3 years, and I very rarely get any spam. In contrast, I get *ridiculous* amounts of spam in my Outlook account, and a smallish amount in my Gmail account. Hotmail, forget it, I just had to abandon my old Hotmail account to the spam.
I’ve always wondered how Yahoo does such a good job of spam filtering, actually. Especially for a free service, I’m very pleased with the low level of spam. Thanks, Yahoo!
Lots of complaints about a FREE service. Why not go elsewhere for your mail service?
I have never, in any email inbox, received the typical “you have won millions” or ” cash my check”, etc. email.
Guess I’m just lucky!