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Meet your new Gmail protector and say goodbye to spam

Discover Google's Advanced Spam-Fighting RETVec

Arthur Gaplanyan

Nobody likes spam. It clutters up your inbox and wastes your time trying to get to your real emails, plus many of them are malicious in nature.

Google has always worked hard to combat spam, but it’s an ongoing battle as spammers would find ways to manipulate their text so Gmail filters have a hard time recognizing them as spam. Which is why you get loads of spam.

Well, all of that is changing…right now.

Google has just rolled out an advanced security filter called RETVec, which stands for Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer. Yeah, I know. Not exactly a sexy name, but the technology should reduce the spam in your inbox in a significant way.

Spammers fight filters in a variety of ways, including invisible characters, LEET substitution (where numbers are substituted for letters), and intentional typos. Email filters scan the text and have a harder time identifying spam when the text is manipulated in these manners.

RETVec scans email differently

RETVec on the other hand, doesn’t scan the text in the same manner. What it does is map words and phrases into numerical data for analysis. It uses the numerical results to interpret, predict, and associate word similarities to determine the likelihood of the message being spam. It’s quite complex, but you don’t really need to worry about how it works. Just that it does.

And boy does it. RETVec is definitely an advanced spam detector. According to Google’s internal testing, their spam detection accuracy has improved by 38%! Plus, those annoying false alarms when legit emails are marked as spam? They’ve dropped by nearly 20% (19.4%).

Just a heads up if you’re sending out emails for your business, such as newsletters or promotions. With RETVec being extra vigilant, there’s a chance your emails could mistakenly get flagged as spam. It’s a good idea to keep tabs on your email analytics to make sure they’re getting delivered as you expect.

Besides beefing up security, RETVec is also about efficiency. Google has managed to cut down the model’s use of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) by a whopping 83%. This means lower computing costs and quicker processing.

So, while RETVec is turning Gmail into a fortress against cyber threats and spam, it’s also keeping things running smoothly and swiftly.

Other options?

Not a Gmail user? No worries. It’s likely we’ll see similar tech popping up in other email services, like Microsoft’s, soon enough.

While I always praise these advancements to help keep everyone safe, I also always have to say that there are full-fledged email security solutions out there that let you take complete control of your inbox. Our email security not only eliminates spam, it actively protects your entire domain from cyber attacks. If you’re tired of too much junk getting to you or you want to know exactly what the best options are for your business’s email security, I’m just a message away.

Stay safe and spam-free!