If you have been met with an avalanche of emails that shouldn’t have bothered you otherwise, you aren’t alone. Several users have been exasperated with a deluge of spam mail. These random emails springing up out of the blue is courtesy of the Gmail spam filter which hasn’t been doing its job right. This means that emails that should stay put in the spam folder get past the filter, ready to bother you. Users are taking to social media to express their displeasure about the spam messages flooding their inboxes. Messages promising Yeti coolers and window replacements aren’t exactly what you call ideal mail. Read along to know more.
Spam Jam
The exact details of how the spam filter works are still a mystery, according to Francisco Janez-Martino, a researcher at the University of Leon who studies spam detection software. The reason for this mysterious functioning is simple. Publically giving out information about how the spam filter works will be like giving an easy key to those waiting to bypass the filter. Hence none of the leading companies publish papers explaining the working of their filters.
Despite the lack of information about these filters, academics do have an idea about how they work. According to Janez-Martino, anti-spam filters mostly use artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing. They help in extracting and collecting information from email headers, bodies, and attachments, ultimately helping to discern if an email is a spam. The way a user interacts with the email, whether they report one as spam, all are crucial determining factors. Even if you randomly click on the mail out of curiosity, it is an indication of your interest. Matters would get worse if you opened one such mail and forgot to report it.
The What And Why
According to Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, Google’s spam filter lacks the finesse of others.
“The filter uses a few factors, and depending on the receiving server it includes the time it was sent, the content of the message, as well as comparing it to blocked senders lists, blacklists, and blocked character sets. These components come together to give each email a score. If the email gets a high spam likelihood score, it’s sent to junk mail,” says Professor Woodward.
According to the professor, one reason for the deluge of spam mail might be that Google tweaked this threshold slightly in response to the criticism from the Republican party. It had been quite an issue as a good majority of their mails were being blocked in comparison to that of Democrats. The modifications made in response to the criticism might have tampered the spam filter settings.
For now, it looks like the spam messages are not going to stop. Till things change, it will be wise to keep an eye out for these spam emails, and not forget to click “Report Spam” if you open them.
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