We find a couple of news items coming out of Yahoo this morning, as one of their top executives has left the company only several days after Yahoo named their new CEO Carol Bartz.
Satish Dharmaraj, who is the founder of Zimbra, an innovative and open source email startup which was acquired by Yahoo and was seen as one of their smartest acquisitions in years according to many in the tech field, including myself.
Under Dharmaraj’s vision, Yahoo Mail has tweaked itself substantially with an entirely new email admin and user customization which includes the ability to message via email or add RSS feeds to Yahoo Mail to use it as a news reader. Many of these changes, plus future ones, are influenced by Zimbra.
After the announcement of Dharmaraj’s departure from Yahoo, the Yahoo Mail team added their own announcement, as Yahoo Mail has implemented new anti-spam measures, which Yahoo hopes will lead to less attrition from Yahoo to other webmail clients like GMail, and also enhance the overall Yahoo user experience.
One way we’re turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’s anti-spam team has been using a “supercomputer” consisting of thousands of individual PCs — part of our open source Hadoop project — to help detect spammers. We’re teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage.
We’re also out there working with partners big and small to help reduce spam across the Internet. We’ve seen some promising early results from one such company, a startup named Abaca, and our hopes are high that together we can block even more of these messages by looking at spammers’ behavior in addition to the contents of their spammy messages.
