How Google and Yahoo want to fight spam better

We see them less but their presence remains massive. As the non-profit association Signal Spam reminds us, spam remains an endemic and massive phenomenon. These unwanted emails, two thirds of unwanted marketing and one third for malicious purposes, represent between 85% and 95% of the volume exchanged daily on the messengers.

To better combat this scourge, Google – one of the market leaders with Gmail – and Yahoo! – one of his challengers – have just unveiled a joint announcement. Or a reminder of their convergence of views on how to stem spam.

New rules

The two companies will indeed soon set up new rules for mass senders. As Google reminds us, if its tools based on artificial intelligence manage to block 99.9% of spam and phishing attempts – sometimes at the cost of untimely blocking of legitimate shipments -, there are still holes in the racket.

So, by the next first quarter, Google and Yahoo! will ask mass senders to authenticate. This new obligation can be met by registering with the various existing solutions, whether it is SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) or the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication) registration, an email security protocol designed to prevent email spoofing.

Common trick

Cybercriminals frequently resort to this kind of spoofing to give more legitimacy to their malicious emails. The two young Frenchmen recently prosecuted for sending extortion emails embroidered around pornography had, for example, explained to the court how they had been able to very simply usurp the addresses of senders, a way to make their threats credible.

In addition to this authentication, Google and Yahoo! finally, they plan to make it easier to unsubscribe from a list. It must be possible with one click and should not take more than two days. Finally, they threaten to ban senders who register a spam rate declared by the recipients too high.