
Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? - zatkin
Imagine for a moment that you are on the GMail team and you need to solve the problem of deciding whether an email intended for one of your customers (@gmail.com user) is going to go to the Inbox or Spam folder.<p>The world is full of actors - both good and bad - who are hungry to get their message into Inbox.<p>So how would you ensure only the good actors land in the Inbox?
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pacificenigma
You start with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and IP reputation.

But then I'd use the moat GMail enjoys as a primary mail destination by
statistically looking at the frequency an incoming email's metadata and
content similarity has recently arrived at GMail as a whole, then moving
suspicious arrivals into a progressive exposure pathway that tentatively
delivers a small percent to known currently-active users (eg mobile GMail app
open on screen and unlocked) and see what percentage are flagged as spam,
archived or deleted. Then use that real time feedback to vary the delivery
flow of remaining messages to inbox vs spam.

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gt565k
First and foremost you want to make sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are valid from
the sender's mail server

[https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2019/04/09-understanding-s...](https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2019/04/09-understanding-
spf-dkim-dmarc)

Then, email filtering companies use things like IP Address of the sender,
keywords, and NLP, and other tools to determine if the email has spam and
assign it some kind of score to it.

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quickthrower2
You can use the + feature to generate different email addresses and then chuck
anything coming to the root address. That way when you get spam on a
particular address you just block that one address.

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buboard
Apart from a preapproved list of contacts, I would ask for a fee to deliver
each message and only high bidders get to pass. Which is more or less what
they re doing

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gesman
Perfect task for AI. Especially considering that Google has more resources for
it than bad actor.

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joegahona
This sounds like a product-manager-interview question.

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gtirloni
Interview question? ;)

