06 December 2023 , 16:44
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If you feel like you are constantly clearing out spam and suspicious-looking emails then good news is coming to your Gmail inbox. Google is in the process of rolling out a new filtering service with the US firm boasting that the changes offer "the largest defence upgrades in recent years."
The Gmail upgrade is aimed at targeting scammers and spammers who have found clever ways to bypass Google's previous methods of stopping rogue messages.
Cyber crooks continue to get smarter and many have worked out that using homoglyphs, invisible characters, and keyword stuffing can prevent Google's AI machine-learning models from spotting emails that could be dangerous or simply clog up inboxes.
Not to be outdone, engineers in California have now developed a new way of syphoning out these emails which means harmful spam shouldn't end up slipping through the net.
In fact, Google reckons its new system is now 38% better than before and also reduces annoying false positives by 19.4%.
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"To help make text classifiers more robust and efficient, we’ve developed a novel, multilingual text vectorizer called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer)," Google explained in a blog post.
"Over the past year, we battle-tested RETVec extensively inside Google to evaluate its usefulness and found it to be highly effective for security and anti-abuse applications. In particular, replacing the Gmail spam classifier’s previous text vectorizer with RETVec allowed us to improve the spam detection rate over the baseline by 38%."
It's good news as inboxes will now be far less cluttered, it will also cut down on the chances of seeing messages that could trick you into handing over sensitive data.
Gmail users don't need to do anything to take advantage of the update but they should start to see less junk appearing in between actual messages they want to read.