How Gmail Fights Spam

Email Deliverability - Justin Premick - October 31st, 2007 - Permalink

Stumbled across this yesterday: Google Blog: It’s Not About The Spam.

The video they included with their post gives a basic — and amusing — overview of what they do to filter out spam while delivering wanted email to the inbox. (Bonus: the lab costumes add a nice Halloween touch!)

Check out the video:

A Couple Observations

The “community clicks” system they talk about (where spam complaints help them determine what should/shouldn’t be filtered) is pretty typical. All major ISPs use complaints to determine what they should deliver and what they should filter.
On the other hand, the use of their Book Search technology to read the text that appears in HTML images is a new twist.

Did you notice that they talk about the importance of making sure that wanted mail gets delivered, and not sent to the spam folder?

It’s a good reminder that deliverability isn’t a “you vs. the ISPs” situation. It’s a “you + ISPs vs. the spammers” one, so be sure you’re marketing responsibly and not making yourself look like a spammer through tactics like unnecessary punctuation.

Check out the page they link to from the blog, particularly the last section. Unlike many other major ISPs, Gmail does not offer whitelisting, instead relying on email authentication and their filtering technology to process incoming mail. If you’re not already authenticating your email, you should start.

(PS: if you’re an AWeber user, we authenticate your campaigns already :))

More Resources on Filtering, Authentication and Email Deliverability

If you haven’t already done so, snag a copy of our Email Deliverability Guide — it’s free to our blog subscribers — and check out the links below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under Email Deliverability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.

2 Responses

  1. BeachBum
    October 31st, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    Very interesting topic. I did notice that Google did not have a whitelist option. Thank You Aweber for authenticating for us. :-)

  2. Clive Hornsby
    November 4th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    An increasing number of people I know are using Gmail to filter out their spam, by redirecting email from their domains through Gmail and then onto their desktop email programs.

    Thanks for picking up on this topic from Google as I can pass it on for others to study. If we can utilise the skills of the big players like Google and Yahoo to weed out the spam it would make life better fo all of us.

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