Google Says Its AI Catches 99.9 Percent of Gmail Spam

About a decade ago, spam brought email to near-ruin. The contest to save your inbox was on, with two of the world's biggest tech companies vying for the title of top spam-killer. By February 2012, Microsoft boasted that its spam filters were removing all but 3 percent of the junk messages from Hotmail, the company's online email service at the time. Google responded by claiming that its service, Gmail, removed all but about one percent of spam messages, adding that its false positives rate--legitimate mail misidentified as spam--was also about one percent. It was a point of pride for the two companies, particularly Microsoft, whose Hotmail service once carried such a poor reputation for spam. And the relative success of both showed that heuristic technologies--which identify spam based on a pre-defined rules--were working.