dan deneweth
Wow! This is pretty cool. Ron Amadeo from ARS Technica reports on a significant, AI-based spam filter update at Gmail. Gmail can now understand “adversarial text manipulations” using a new mechanism called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer), meaning that it basically renders graphics of everything written to compare it all for spam classification purposes, based on the words and other bits extracted from the message, basically regardless of how they’re encoded. Using emojis to trick people in spam, because writing something it out in words will get you blocked? That might not fly now. Using cyrillic characters (that look visually similar to a user but look different to a text classifier) to try to skate by Gmail filters and hide the nature of what you’re sending? Nuh-uh. (Interestingly, I’ve known for a while now that Gmail can take issue with certain special characters or emojis in certain places in
Whenever somebody starts to have deliverability problems, the first question I ask is, “What changed?” Because usually drives a deliverability issue is found through a change in practice, process, platform or PII. Oracle’s Dan Deneweth goes deeper — outlining the thirteen most common warning signs that precipitate deliverability issues. In other words, the answer to “What changed?” is usually one of these baker’s dozen of reasons. To learn what those pitfalls are and how to avoid them, click here to read more.