Gmail is Now Blocking 100 Million Extra Spam Messages Every Day With AI (theverge.com) 72
Google has recruited its in-house machine learning framework, TensorFlow, to help train additional spam filters for Gmail users. With the new filters in place as of last month, the company claims Gmail is now blocking an extra 100 million spam messages every day. From a report: In the context of Gmail's 1 billion-plus users, this isn't necessarily a huge gain -- it works out as one extra blocked spam email per 10 users -- but Google says Gmail already blocks 99.99 percent of spam, so working out what constitutes that last sliver of a percentage is hard.
Props when deserved (Score:5, Interesting)
Use gmail for work for decade+, spam has certainly never been a problem.
Although, it does seem to be a bit aggressive sometimes.
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Clarification, 6 years, but it feels like a decade.
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So you don't care about false filters, eh? (Score:2)
I always wonder if people who praise Gmail's filters are shills or sycophants, or they just never notice the failures. Anecdotal evidence, but here are a few low points of my experience with Gmail, which I continue to use only because the alternatives seem no better (though some are clearly worse).
(1) I just had another false negative this morning. Especially relevant to today's story because the slightest intelligence, artificial or otherwise, would have known it could not possibly be valid email for me.
(2
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Yeah, I'm using email from my the biggest operator in my country. Gmail made that email unusable, simply because
a) So many use gmail
b) By default, all mails from my ISP are marked as spam, so gmail users never get my mail
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Are you sure that's not because the biggest operator in your country isn't responsible for massive amounts of spam email?
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Although, it does seem to be a bit aggressive sometimes.
No kidding. About a third of my e-mails to friends who use gmail get blocked, and I have to find an e-mail from them to reply to not to get it blocked. These are all personal e-mails with no links, no mention of products, and really nothing that makes them appear to be spam to any human.
And given that much of the e-mail get through, it's not any blocking due to the sender address or sending server either.
My advice right now to my friends is to to ditch gmail due to this - they risk not getting quite a lot
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That's fine I will be blocking all gmail as spam, want to send be email that doesn't bounce, don't use Gmail. Nasty company, nothing should be done to support it or it mass invasions of privacy. Want to really hurt Google, force them to pay attention, force them to serve us instead of us serving them, then block Gmail and make it worthless.
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Use gmail for work for decade+, spam has certainly never been a problem.
Although, it does seem to be a bit aggressive sometimes.
I'm pretty sure in the 12 years I've been using Gmail I've never had a false positive. The only way I'd know is if someone emailed me and then told me and this to date has never happened. The biggest issue is sometimes the commercial emails I want end up in Spam (I.E. offers from any company in Las Vegas for some reason) but that isn't a major issue for me. Even the spam folder is mostly ads from companies I don't want to hear from rather than actual spam.
Conversely I have a Hotmail account that I've had
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Because of Buzzword.
When I started working, I help code Decision Support Systems, then they Became Business Intelligence Systems, Now they are called AI.
Of course I am not sure if My job is an Application Architect or Full Stack Developer?
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if it's software it's ai
if it's material it's 3d printed
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And the result is more false positives (Score:4, Interesting)
And, the result is more false positives ...
In the past 6 to 8 weeks, I found several emails from people I know in the Spam folder.
The strange thing is that those were from email addresses are in my contact list, and have been communicating with me for years.
Bad move Google ...
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It's even worse than that (for me, at least). In the past week, google has bounced several of my perfectly ordinary e-mails to family members with gmail accounts. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the AI that it's an idiot. I can't even begin to guess what it thinks is spammy about the e-mails that it's blocked. They don't seem to have anything in common except that they came from me.
The bizarre thing is that (so far) if I re-send the exact same e-mail a few minutes later, it doesn't bounce.
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The bizarre thing is that (so far) if I re-send the exact same e-mail a few minutes later, it doesn't bounce.
Not only is their AI very smart, it's quick learning too!
Time for more real intelligence? (Score:3)
You managed to remind me of what I still think is the best solution approach. It's actually another aspect of MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation). In this application, the dimensions of concern are those that would indicate a particular person with ACTUAL human intelligence is (or is not) skilled at recognizing spam.
One implementation (but the google will never implement it) would be as an opt-in spammer-fighting tool beyond the incredibly naive Spam button. (The additional phishing-report opti
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Came here to say the same thing. Gmail's spam filtering is abysmal. I couldn't find a robust way to flag email as "not spam" either. And what's with the 30day expiry? Then it's just gone? I have missed several bills due to this and had to pay late fees. Hey Google, storage is cheap (and you pioneered this with amazing 1gb limit back in the early 2000s) so how about giving us a few more days to go through the spam that your AI has falsely flagged?
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Google will soon introduce another AI to find all those notices from your bank, airline, library, car manufacturer, and doctors that went to your spam folder.
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Any chance they are correlational attacks from the spammers? I've seen some evidence that at least one of the main spammers has managed to link many of the email address for better impersonation attacks. In that case, what you are describing could be an overreaction from the Gmail filters, perhaps based on pairings that are completely out of your scope...
Re:And the result is more false positives (Score:4, Informative)
Being in your contact list is not a white flag. A common tactic of spam malware is to send the contact list of infected person's PC to the spam author. They then spam everyone in the contact list using the owner of the list as the From: email address, precisely in the hopes that an email "from" someone you know is more likely to make it past your spam filter.
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And, the result is more false positives ...
In the past 6 to 8 weeks, I found several emails from people I know in the Spam folder.
It's worse than that. Perfectly legitimate e-mail gets outright rejected before it makes it to the spam folder. As a recipient, you won't even know, and have no way of finding out.
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And, the result is more false positives ...
In the past 6 to 8 weeks, I found several emails from people I know in the Spam folder.
The strange thing is that those were from email addresses are in my contact list, and have been communicating with me for years.
Bad move Google ...
This problem is not new - it's been around since forever.
Blocked or filtered to Spam folder ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had a GMail account since the invitation only days. I actually got an invite from someone giving them away on slashdot. I am careful about where I use the address and I get very little spam (about 10 / month or less).
When I read about GMail's great spam filters I wonder does that mean that the spam emails are actually blocked (ie. never make it to me at all) or just filtered to my Spam folder.
Re:Blocked or filtered to Spam folder ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've probably been using gmail as long as you. Might have even got the invitation from the same place.
I'm fairly positive that all spam goes to the spam folder. I can't remember the last time I had to mark a spam message. I do look at the spam folder periodically for its entertainment value and to keep up with the flavor of the current scams. I haven't had a false positive in many years.
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I've seen fewer emails in my gmail spam folder lately, but have also sent ordinary transnational emails to gsuite/gmail users that ended up in their spam folders. It started recently, so they have some kinks to work out.
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One thing they seem to be doing now is preventing people from sending through GMail if it's suspected as spam, it bounces back to the sender. I'm the admin of a forum (running for about 2 decades now). We use GMail for account activation, notifications, etc. We've used it for years, the past couple months it's become virtually unusable (literally unusable for new users), with all the forum notifications being flagged as spam and not even reaching the destination.
Big deal (Score:1)
I say, so what. I've been using Popfile for years. Is this "new AI" some how a magical unicorn that's better than Bayesian style filtering? Probably the same thing.
How is this even news? Filtering is nothing special. Also not particularly difficult to 'train' up a filter.. just need a bunch of spam, and non-spam to feed it.
Gmail is used to spam others though (Score:2)
Isn't the biggest issue with Gmail not whether their users get spammed, but the fact that gmail is used to spam others? It's like they refuse to scan their outbound emails for spam, despite knowing that spammers use their service.
Also, they push everyone to use SPF/DKIM/DMARC, yet gmail itself doesn't use it, making it easier for spammers to send crap as gmail.
That's kind of fucked up.
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Hmm... I don't have hard stats but my feeling is that the spam that actually originates within Gmail is a relatively small part of it. However there is a large fraction of spam that uses Gmail accounts as the drop boxes for the suckers, either with Reply-to: headers or in the body of the pitch.
Since I do most of my spam analysis within Gmail, it is not clear if that is a Gmail-specific problem (of better spammer support) or if the spammers just use that approach for each target email system. In that hypothe
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Talk to the people who run email servers, especially those hosted email services. They hate gmail. And not because it's competition, but because of the pain of having to work with gmail.
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Not sure what triggered your late reply, but sort of curious what you mean by the pain of "having to work with gmail".
I was actually a postmaster for what was probably, at that time, the largest free email system in Tokyo. My vague recollection is that the cooperation among postmasters was always limited.
I spend a lot of time in the "Junk" folder now (Score:4, Funny)
It's making my business negotiations with Nigerian princes very difficult. Maybe I should go into boner pills instead.
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Your DP robots look fake, which is normally redundant unless you do it really bad.
Not good enough (Score:2)
Instead of filtering malmail, they should be fighting malmail in a way that matters.
* Every phishing email should receive an equal number of plausible (scripted/AI written) replies from dedicated email addresses and domains. (This poisons the well.)
* Every site employing "sign up for promotional emails by default" checkbox should be downranked on Google.
* Every site employing "signing up implies consent for promotional emails until you cancel them" should be delisted from Google.
* Every domain found to have
Doesn't like non-google email lists (Score:2)
It always puts those in my spam folder, which it hides so I don't realize it put them there.
Other than that, it works fairly well.
I feel sorry for legitimate salespeople trying to sell you stuff personally, though.
missed monetization opportunity (Score:1)
Easy solution (Score:2)
Spam as an attack (Score:2)