Yahoo! is taking a big step towards ensuring their Mail users receive less spam.  The search engine company with a new CEO has hired a couple of companies to enhance their mailing technology in order to detect spam and notify marketing companies about e-mail user habits.

Yahoo! recently hired Abaca, a company that makes e-mail security technology to detect phishing and spam messages.  Yahoo! will be using Abaca to detect spam messages and filter them out of Yahoo! Mail inboxes and into a spam folder.  Abaca’s technology partners include VMWare, First Class Application Partner, and Coyote Point Systems Inc.

Return Path was also hired by Yahoo! Return Path monitors e-mails that were reported as spam and notifies e-mail marketers.  This way it will train e-mail marketers how to brand their e-mails to prevent looking too much like spam.

Lastly Yahoo!’s anti-spam team will be utilizing a “supercomputer” made of thousands of PCs as part of the open source Hadoop project to detect spammers even further.  Yahoo! partnered with several universities for this project.

Mark Risher, Anti-Spam Czar for Yahoo! reminds Mail users that “if Yahoo! Mail does let something slip through into the wrong folder — either allowing spam into your inbox or mistakenly putting a good message in your Spam folder — please use the ‘Spam’ and ‘Not Spam’ buttons to let us know. Clicking those buttons sends an immediate and powerful signal to our systems (and to me so that we can quickly try to correct the problem. It’s the best way for us to get better, and to continue keeping your e-mail experience great!”