Yahoo has finally decided that at least one thing there should work right in their company and I guess they’re focusing on their spam filters. It’s no secret that Hotmail and Yahoo have a pretty bad track record when it comes to keeping spam out of your inbox.
Gmail uses its own Google technology to keep spam out and it works great. It definitely leaps and bounds better than what Yahoo and Hotmail have been using and they’ve both been around for more than twice as long as Gmail.
Yahoo is now trying to change that perception. Mark Risher, Yahoo’s “anti-spam czar,” posted on the Yahoo Mail blog on Tuesday. He described some of the efforts being used to cut down on spam:
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.
Maybe next Yahoo will follow Gmail’s lead and finally provide free mail forwarding and multiple email account handling via one account for people who either want to use a different primary webmail app or at least manage multiple accounts from their primary Yahoo account.
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