Gmail Now Uses TensorFlow to Detect 100 Million More Spam Emails

Google today announced that it’s super-powering Gmail’s spam detection tech with a bunch of new machine learning technology powered by its own TensorFlow framework. The company says it’s using some of TensorFlow’s capabilities to detect 100 million more spam emails every day.

With Gmail apparently being used by 1.5 billion users every month, the service has a lot of emails to deal with. And although Gmail is decent at detecting basic/slightly-complex spam emails, it often struggles to detect spam emails that are disguised as regular emails. Thanks to TensorFlow, Gmail is now able to block more complex messages, like image-based spam emails, emails with hidden embedded content, and emails from newly created domains that are used to hide low volume of spammy messages within legitimate traffic.

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TensorFlow also helps Gmail provided more personalised spam detection — for example, if an email is considered spam by one person, it doesn’t mean it will be considered spam on your inbox, so Gmail make sure to deal with that appropriately.

Google isn’t saying whether TensorFlow will help with the accuracy of spam detection when it comes to flagging non-spam email as spam, but the personalised spam detection should help.

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Conversation 5 comments

  • dontbe evil

    06 February, 2019 - 11:53 pm

    <p>Their filter is so amazing (/s) that they even put genuine ms mail in spam (true story)</p>

  • Jeff Jones

    07 February, 2019 - 12:25 am

    <p>That might explain why I started noticing a lot more valid "newsletters" getting shunted into the spam folder back in January. After repeatedly marking newsletters from the same companies as "not spam" I finally had to set a filter to keep it out of spam.</p>

  • skane2600

    07 February, 2019 - 2:44 am

    <p>I don't think I've received more than 5 spam emails in my inbox using gmail in the last 5 years.</p>

  • markbyrn

    Premium Member
    08 February, 2019 - 9:43 am

    <p>whatever Google has to filter spam, they got it right. </p>

  • zybch

    08 February, 2019 - 7:22 pm

    <p>Ironically, ALL the website advertisement spam I am subjected to when browsing the net (unless I have an adblocker turned on) is from google!</p>

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