Yahoo! Adds New Spam Tools

Yahoo! is adding initiatives to help cut down on the amount of email spam.

The company has announced a few new initiatives to help fight junk email.

Spend half your day fighting spam? Yahoo! wants its email users to spend more of their day doing loftier pursuits. The company just announced new spam-fighting initiatives that will hopefully add a few extra minutes to your day.

According to Digital Trends, part of that plan includes a supercomputer of thousands of little computers. In a blog post, Yahoo! said:

“One way we’re turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’s anti-spam team has been using a “supercomputer” consisting of thousands of individual PCs—part of our open source Hadoop project—to help detect spammers. We’re teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage.”

Other plans include incorporating some of Abaca’s spam-fighting technology. Finally, another initiative will include Return Path’s anti-spam feedback loop. That means when someone flags an email as spam, Yahoo! will notify the sender.

My Yahoo! account is dedicated to potential spammers. It’s always the one I give out when ordering gifts, signing up for email newsletters, and when in-store retailers ask for an address. This could get interesting.