Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail?

Posted by zatkin on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:02PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Imagine for a moment that you are on the GMail team and you need to solve the problem of deciding whether an email intended for one of your customers (@gmail.com user) is going to go to the Inbox or Spam folder.

The world is full of actors - both good and bad - who are hungry to get their message into Inbox.

So how would you ensure only the good actors land in the Inbox?

( 7 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by pacificenigma on Saturday December 07, 2019 @08:57PM (#21733921)

You start with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and IP reputation.

But then I'd use the moat GMail enjoys as a primary mail destination by statistically looking at the frequency an incoming email's metadata and content similarity has recently arrived at GMail as a whole, then moving suspicious arrivals into a progressive exposure pathway that tentatively delivers a small percent to known currently-active users (eg mobile GMail app open on screen and unlocked) and see what percentage are flagged as spam, archived or deleted. Then use that real time feedback to vary the delivery flow of remaining messages to inbox vs spam.

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by gt565k on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:12PM (#21714627)

First and foremost you want to make sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are valid from the sender's mail server

https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2019/04/09-understanding-s...

Then, email filtering companies use things like IP Address of the sender, keywords, and NLP, and other tools to determine if the email has spam and assign it some kind of score to it.

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by quickthrower2 on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:40PM (#21715684)

You can use the + feature to generate different email addresses and then chuck anything coming to the root address. That way when you get spam on a particular address you just block that one address.

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by buboard on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:00PM (#21715192)

Apart from a preapproved list of contacts, I would ask for a fee to deliver each message and only high bidders get to pass. Which is more or less what they re doing

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by gesman on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:01PM (#21715885)

Perfect task for AI. Especially considering that Google has more resources for it than bad actor.

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by joegahona on Saturday December 07, 2019 @03:14PM (#21732311)

This sounds like a product-manager-interview question.

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Re:Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? by gtirloni on Thursday December 05, 2019 @09:30PM (#21718780)

Interview question? ;)

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