Google Gmail is used by more than 1.5 billion people world-wide, making it by the planet’s most popular email platform. From Gmail’s impressive AI auto-response to the platform’s seamless integration with Google’s other products, it is easy to understand why Google’s sleek email manager is such a hit. We can receive dozens or even hundreds of emails every day and many of these are unwanted. Fortunately, Google Gmail has a powerful spam management system.
Start with a message open from the sender you wish to block.
On the right hand side is a down arrow – click this and a menu will appear.
Select the Block Sender Name and a confirmation message displays indicating that future messages from this sender will be marked as spam.
These emails will be sent straight to your Spam folder after clicking the Block button in the confirmation message.
There is also an option to unblock a sender, by re-opening the drop-down menu.
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A confirmation message displays indicating that future messages from this sender will appear in your inbox.
Simply click the Unblock button in the confirmation message.
Users can also use the filter to send messages from a specific sender straight to a certain label.
You may wish, for example, to filter all messages from a former employee so that they automatically go to a certain label.
Click the arrow on the right of the Gmail search bar to display the Advanced Gmail search box.
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Type the name of the sender whose messages you wish to filter into the From field.
You can be more specific with your filter by specifying more information in the other fields.
When you are done entering information, click the Create filter with this search link and the Create filter box will appear.
This Create box asks you what you wish to do with every message that meets the criteria you defined in the Advanced Gmail search box.
Note that several options, such as Delete it and Skip the Inbox, would keep these messages out of your Gmail inbox.
The Delete it option, in particular, will keep an unwanted message from a sender out of both your inbox and Spam folder.
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Tech giant Google has recruited its in-house machine learning framework, TensorFlow, to help the spam filters for Gmail users.
With the new filters in place as of last month, Google claims Gmail is now blocking an extra 100 million spam messages daily.
Although this is not necessarily a huge gain — it works out as one extra blocked spam email per 10 users — Gmail already blocks 99.9 percent of spam, so understanding the remaining part of a percentage is hard.
Neil Kumaran, product manager of Counter Abuse Technology at Google said: “At the scale we’re operating at, an additional 100 million is not easy to come by.
“Getting the last bit of incremental spam is increasingly hard, but TensorFlow has been great for closing that gap.“