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.
Risher also talks about relaunching Yahoo’s Complaint Feedback Loop with assistance from email deliverability company Return Path. This means that when companies sending legitimate emails get marked as spam, they can be notified and make adjustments to prevent this in the future.
Finally, Risher reiterates a point made in the past that Yahoo Mail users should frequently use the “spam” and “not spam” buttons when spam messages are delivered to their inboxes, and when legitimate messages are delivered to their spam folders. This notifies the company so they can fix the issue.
