Gary Robinson

Who is Gary Robinson?

Gary Robinson is an American software engineer and inventor notable for his mathematical algorithms to fight spam. In addition, he patented a method to use web browser cookies to track consumers across different web sites, allowing marketers to better match advertisements with consumers. The patent was bought by DoubleClick, and then DoubleClick was bought by Google.

In 2003, Robinson published an article in Linux Journal which discussed mathematical approaches for fighting spam which led to work along with Tim Peters on the SpamBayes project which began in 2002. The SpamBayes approach was notable because it assigned scores to both spam and ham and used an algorithm to guess intelligently whether an incoming email was spam; the scoring system enabled the program to return a value of unsure if both the spam and ham scores were high. His mathematical approaches were also used in projects such as SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin combined a Bayesian statistical approach using a text-classifier rule-based approach to whittle down spam.