Email Security – Are you ready for next-gen email security? (YES!)
Email Security: Are you ready for next-gen email security (YES!) Blog Article
December 5, 2024

I’m Lewis, the director of Shepherd IT. I had a passion for technology since I was a young boy, I excelled in IT and computer science at college and started my career as a technology analyst helping people with their businesses IT problems.

Third week into the new year and Google has released a powerful new tool to improve Email Security!! This tool makes your Gmail inbox safer and spam-free, going by RETVec.

So what is this anonymous RETVec??

To make it simple, RETVec stands for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer. Sound quite Techy, right? It’s a tool that makes Gmail even better at detecting spam emails that try to creep into your inbox.

People behind the spam emails can be quite clever and avoid detection. Many of these sneaky people will use invisible characters, something called LEET substitution (like “3xpl4in3d” instead of “explained”), and intentional typos to get past your email security. However, RETVec has been made to identify these tricks, giving you better Gmail email security.

Google explains it as mapping words or phrases to real numbers and then using these numbers for further analysis, predictions, and figuring out word similarities. In short, it’s like giving Gmail a supercharged spam radar.

So how does all this email security stuff benefit you? Well, Gmail’s spam detection rate shot up by 38% with RETVec now in place. WOAH! And to add, Gmail’s false positive rate dropped by nearly a fifth. Meaning that’s 19.4% fewer false alarms.

What’s the catch? There must be one, right? Well, you should be aware of this if your Business sends promotional emails.

With RETVec’s increased vigilance, some legitimate emails might get caught in the crossfire. You should keep an eye on your email analytics to ensure your emails reach their intended recipients.

The new email security tool RETVec isn’t just about better security, it’s more efficient too. Google reports that the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) usage of the model dropped by a whopping 83%. Smaller models mean reduced computational costs and faster delivery, this is a game changer for large scale applications and on-device models. It’s a win-win situation!

The go-to weapon for cyber criminals is spam, and now with RETVec, we have better email security in place to protect us.

If you don’t use Gmail, don’t feel too left out. It’s likely we’ll see other email providers including Microsoft bringing similar protection in the future.

In the meantime, if you’d like us to review your business’s email security, get in touch.