Improved spam filtering – we need your help!
We’re pleased to announce that we are currently rolling out Tuta’s new spam filters to all Tuta Mail accounts. Very soon you will have close to zero spam in your end-to-end encrypted Inbox.
First things first:
Tuta is rolling out client-side filtering that learns individually, specific to your mailbox and how you yourself classify email as spam or not spam. Because of this, it gets better over time as you report mistakes.
To make sure your mailbox sorts emails correctly, please make sure to:
- Click “Report spam” for unwanted emails in your inbox.
- Click “Not spam” for emails that were wrongly placed in Spam.
- Moving emails into or out of the Spam folder also trains the system.
Spam filtering in an end-to-end encrypted mailbox – not an easy task!
Improved spam filtering in Tuta Mail has been highly requested for a long time because for many users, spam would end up in the inbox, and occasionally legit emails would end up in Spam. But due to the highly technical nature of Tuta’s end-to-end encryption, distinguishing spam mail from legit emails is complex, and there’s not one easy or quick solution to solve it.
But after a lot of planning, our team is proud to have delivered on what the Tuta community requested: less spam in the Inbox!
How spam filtering in Tuta Mail works
How spam filtering worked before
A spammer would send spam mail to a Tuta user, and Tuta’s server filter would then make a decision if the message would be sorted to spam or inbox based on user reports and various criteria.
But the issue with filtering on the server was that it wasn’t very precise when it came to understanding what was spam versus what was genuine email. And the result? A lot of spam made it to your Inbox which shouldn’t have happened.
How Tuta’s new spam filtering works
A simplified diagram showing how Tuta Mail’s new spam filtering works.
With email providers like Gmail or Outlook, there’s no end-to-end encryption by default, making it much easier for these providers to accurately distinguish spam and train their filters on the server side.
However,at Tuta we end-to-end encrypt all mailboxes so we do not have access to the contents of a user’s mailbox, and we cannot know what they clssify as spam or as genuine emails. This makes it a much more challenging task for us to accurately implement spam filtering compared to Big Tech email services.
This is why our team developed an innovative method which uses machine learning on the user’s device, fully end-to-end encrypted. With the new spam filtering that’s being rolled out, our team has implemented a second filtering stage – a client filter. In the client filter, machine learning is used to learn what is spam versus what is genuine email based on the user’s individual actions: did they move emails from sender X to Spam or Inbox, and how many times. This local learning is required for the filter to accurately distinguish emails, and for this reason, we need you to continue to move spam mail to the Spam folder and genuine emails to Inbox.
This learning takes place locally on the user’s device, and this training data is also synced end-to-end encrypted across the user’s logins to ensure that spam is accurately filtered on all their devices.
Improving user experience while upholding privacy
At Tuta, we are committed to delivering private and secure email, calendars, and soon drive.
Tuta Mail was the first encrypted tool our team developed, and it will always be our primary focus. This is why we have continued to improve Tuta Mail in all aspects. In terms of user security, a big milestone was the release of TutaCrypt providing quantum-proof encryption for your mailbox, and more recently, we also released key verification to strengthen security further.
At Tuta, you - the user - always come first. This means that upholding the best security and privacy is always number one – we cannot and will not implement new features at the cost of our users’ privacy. With that said, we also know that a private mailbox that’s not as efficient as it could be is a hindrance for every-day email management and it is not ideal. This is why our teams also continue to develop new features like email import and improve others, like the new spam filters.
At Tuta, we value your support and feedback and would like to thank you for being a part of our journey, because together we CAN and WILL make the web a better place.
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