As promised here's an update on our ongoing effort to fight Spam for our users.....
For simplicity sake, let's categorize Spam in the following three categories:
1) Known Spam: Email is first checked to see if it is being sent from a known spam location. If so, this email is abruptly discarded and is not processed by our spam rating system and is never delivered to any user. 91% of all the mail our users receive falls into this category and is summarily rejected.
Email that gets past the Known Spam check gets a rating and depending on the rating it is given, falls into one of these places in your account:
2) Junk-Mail Folder: This is email that is rated likely to be spam. Emails that get over a specific rating (currently a 5) are deemed spam and sent to your junk mail folder.
3) Inbox Folder: Some spam email is very cleverly disguised not to look like spam and so our spam rating system gives it a spam score (less than 5). This is the spam that gets into your inbox. Your regular emails, the email you do want, also rates lower than 5 and that's how it gets to your inbox.
So what are we doing about the quantity of junk mail that gets to you? We're working on two things:
1) We are extending our Known Spam capability by enhancing our early detection system to block more spam right at the beginning. We continually update our early detection system, we're now going to be expanding it. Our initial tests indicate that we can improve our initial spam blocking by 30%, which means that instead of blocking 91% of all email, we'll now be blocking more than 95%. This change will increase the amount of spam blocked at the very beginning and that means it will also reduce the amount of spam to your Inbox and your Junk-Mail folder.
2) We've been tracking the ratings of Junk-Mail for some time now and after reviewing the data we've been able to determine that just about everything over a certain number can very safely be qualified as junk. That number on our current scale is 10. So emails that score over 10 are no longer going to be delivered to your junk-mail folder. This change will reduce the amount of spam in your Junk-Mail folder by 60 to 65%.
These changes should signficantly reduce the amount of spam to your Junk-Mail folder and help reduce the amount of Junk-Mail in your Inbox. We don't have exact timing for the changes but we expect them to be complete before the end of June.
A couple of final notes:
As you can today, you will still be able to set your own spam level in your email preferences. So if you want to allow more spam or you are getting some false positives you can still adjust your personal spam rating.
If you're curious about what emails in your account are rated just open an email message and select Full Headers from the menu at the top. Find the line that says: X-Spam-Status and there you will find your score and current threshold. In the example below you'll see that this message was rated 27.6, well above the required 5.0.
That's the update. Please post your feedback or contact me directly at jeremy@bluetie.com.
