Whether you have it open every day as your main email platform or only use it as an occasional backup, you probably have cause to use Gmail from time to time. If so, you are in good company – the most popular email provider on the planet, it now has more than 1.2 billion users.
Like every free email service, it has its pros and cons, but nothing will achieve such a position of global domination unless the good outweighs the bad. One of the main measures of how good any email service is relates to how it handles your spam.
Every one of us gets dozens of spam messages each day. Just like the junk mail that used to come through the letter box, and still does to a certain extent, it is part of life. Spam can be an irritation: It takes up valuable space, it can contain harmful, fraudulent or malicious content and it increases the risk of you missing an important message that is buried in a pile of junk.
Google has its own methods for dealing with spam, but are they good enough?
Gmail’s spam management
The size of the Google community helps to make Gmail’s spam management protocols more effective than those of its main rivals, Yahoo and Hotmail. The main tools they use are things called “community signals.” In essence, what this means is that when you click the “Mark as Spam” button in Gmail, Google uses that information in the way it treats similar future messages that are sent not just to you, but to all 1.2 billion Gmail users.
This is effective to a certain extent, but some might argue that saying the spam management is better than that of Yahoo or Hotmail is a perfect example of “damning with faint praise.” For many, the fact that Gmail classes something as spam because that is what most people say it is does not quite cut the mustard. If this sounds like you, something a little more specialized might be useful.
Spam filtering using Everycloud Tech
The free spam filtering bolt ons with the likes of Gmail are fine if you are happy with 99 percent effectiveness. But for anyone who deals with large amounts of email traffic every day, 99 percent is nowhere close to good enough. It suggests that one in a hundred decisions it makes will be erroneous. For many, even one in a thousand would be too many.
If you want a spam filtering solution that offers a more effective solution, you will need to look to a specialist, and this is where providers such as everycloudtech come to the fore. Their products have been proven 99.99 percent effective, which is the level needed for anyone who uses email regularly and/or professionally. Little wonder their tools are used by 6,000 organizations worldwide.
How effective is effective enough?
In a recent report, Gmail published a whole set of interesting statistics, and unsurprisingly, many related to its spam protection. It stated that 0.1 percent of the mail in the average Gmail box is spam, and that 0.05 percent of the mail in the spam box is actually wanted.
These numbers look OK until you transpose them into “emails per day” that are misfiled. Suddenly, it is a different picture and it becomes obvious why specialist service providers like Everycloud are so important to us.
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