Google Drive finally gets the spam folder it so desperately needed

If you use Google Drive (and really, who doesn’t?), you’ve no doubt been hit with spam shares from people you don’t know. Right now, I have hundreds of shares from users like “Baby69” and “SeCret ParTner NeeDed,” all of which are likely scams. To make this matter worse, Drive, by default, notifies users of each new share, which forced me to simply shut off all share notifications from the app.

Now, finally, there is a Google Drive spam folder to catch this garbage. Google announced this new feature pretty quietly via a blog post during Google I/O, so you might have missed it. Regardless, I now have the feature live in my Drive app, so it’s clearly rolling out at a solid clip.

Essentially, this new spam folder works the same as the one you’ll find in Gmail. It preemptively catches spam shares by scanning the information surrounding that user and the shared content. If you spot a share that is spam that the algorithm missed, you can just drag and drop that share into the spam folder. As usual, this will help the spam algorithm learn what’s spam and what’s not.

Check it out in action in the GIF below.

Google Drive spam folder

After you move a file to the Google Drive spam folder, it will sit there for 30 days. Then, Drive will purge it permanently. Of course, you can always manually clear the spam folder if you like.

Google says this will roll out to all users globally starting May 24. However, as I said, I already have it, so you might have it as well. Regardless, we would expect most people to have access to this by the end of the month or early in June at the latest.