Email services have gotten shockingly good at filtering spam

Every day, about 30 billion emails come through Yahoo's email system, but thankfully, we don't receive every single one that's sent to us.

It turns out that most of the emails addressed to us are spam. Of those 30 billion emails, Yahoo Mail only delivers a handful to inboxes.

Jeff Bonforte, senior vice president of communications products at Yahoo Mail, told our new "Codebreaker" podcast that "anywhere from 90 to 99% of the interactions on the [Yahoo mail] system are some form of abuse."

By abuse, he means spam. 

Yahoo Mail filters the spam from those 30 billion emails, and delivers only 5 billion per weekday, and 2 and a half billion on weekends, according to Bonforte.

Without spam filtering, your inbox could become unbearably cluttered. For example, if you get 10 legitimate emails on any given day, Yahoo Mail probably filtered between 90 and 99 spam emails. Instead of receiving 100, you get 10.

Some spam still makes it through, however, because Yahoo's filters will still allow some that could be legitimate. "We have multiple measures of deliverability. Ones that we don't even let in the door, and then we have ones that customers indicated that they don't want to be delivered," Bonforte said on the podcast. So, you have to tell Yahoo if that weird email you got is spam or not. 

Who knows, maybe you do actually have a rich relative who happens to email you about legitimately wiring you inheritance money.

So even though we may complain a lot about all the spam we receive, just know it could be a lot worse.

Check our more great insights into how we use email in the first episode of Codebreaker, which you can listen to here or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And get ready for the premiere of Codebreaker's first season on November 11. Here's a preview: