Yahoo's Vivek Sharma: Spam Is Like Terrorism

When Yahoo released a new version of its email service last week, it overhauled just about every aspect of the service and focused on the top activities of consumers when it comes to emailing. Vivek Sharma, general manager of communications at Yahoo was in Singapore earlier this week for a discussion of the update with Asian media. He emphasized Yahoo's independence and its Switzerland-like status among Internet service companies as a major strength in getting to consumers.

Yahoo's strength according to Sharma, lies in the fact that it can offer a consistent email experience across major computing platforms. The iPhone app and the Android app are identical in every respect without missing any of the major features available on the web as well as Windows 8 versions.

Sharma said, "we make sure our products perform better than the default or native clients available to them and solve their use cases."

Getting people to use Yahoo Mail again He likens email to cloud storage. Despite the fact that each major platform has their own cloud storage service, people still use Dropbox in greater numbers. Google Drive, iCloud, and SkyDrive are default services for their respective companies' mobile solutions, but it hasn't stopped consumers from using Dropbox.

"The reality is, if you look at our growth across the world, we have users adopting [Yahoo] Mail across all platforms. The reason is that the product is more suitable for their needs", said Sharma. "Users have their own minds and it works to solve their own use cases. Take Dropbox for example. each mobile platform company has its own cloud drive solutions but people still use Dropbox".

Asked whether the commonly held belief that youngsters don't use email, Sharma said, "we don't see that data. It's true that they're using social networks and messaging but we are spending a lot more time on our screens, whether it's on our phones, tablets, or PCs. With people spending more time on screens, it's helping other communication mediums. it's growing across all devices and platforms".

Spam One of the biggest reasons that people are no longer using Yahoo Mail is because of spam. Yahoo's spam filter has been notorious for failing to block spam mails from being delivered to inboxes which led people to switch to other services.

At the media briefing, Sharma wanted to allay those fears by revealing that Yahoo has been blocking roughly 250,000 spam emails per second which amounts to 600 billion per month. Today though, looking at Yahoo's data visualization, that number has gone up to roughly 400,000, while it delivers around 65 thousand legitimate emails per second.

Sharma said, "Spam is like terrorism and we have to be ahead of the terrorists". Yahoo's spam catcher technology also relies on its Mail users to manually report any spam that may have gone through the filter to help it recognize and detect the kinds that it may have missed.