Understanding Spam Filters

Spam filter

Here to Help With The Basics of Understanding Spam Filters

When you are deciding what type of spam filter will be best for your business, there are several things to consider. Buying the most expensive program or subscribing to the highest level of spam filtering service may not always be the best thing to do. The key to selecting the right spam filtering is to match the economy and efficiency of the filter to the level of spam you need to filter, while also planning for the future. Whatever product you decide to use should be able to resolve your immediate problem with spam, and be expandable to handle future modifications to spam practices.

Why filtering always has to change

Spam and viruses not only travel hand in hand, they have much in common in their implementation practices. As developers create tools and resources to effectively filter spam, like they create security products to detect viruses; the spammer has to change their structure and approach to circumvent the filter to get their spam into your inbox. This is why you cannot expect to buy one product or sign up for a static filtering service and be done with the problem for life. Spam changes to work around filters; you need a filter that changes dynamically as well to keep you protected.

The Basic Filter

The basic spam filter is also the most efficient, but the least practical for your business. The basic filter consists of an instruction to the filter to block and redirect any incoming message that does not match a registered address in your contacts list to the spam box or trash. This was one of the most highly effective ways to protect a personal email box because unlike a business, personal emails don’t often contain unknown address contacts that are important. The problem with the basic filter is that spammers have used a variety of methods to scrape contact lists in order to generate spam that appears to come from someone you know to bypass the filter.

Customizing Parameters

A better choice for filtering is to customize the parameters of the filter. The parameters set the rules of logic for a filtering program to decide whether an email is most likely spam or not. For personal use, you can ask it to look at subject lines, internal links and contact addresses and increase the chances of it filtering the majority of spam. For businesses, you need a more dynamic solution where the parameters can include source IPs, redirection detection, content analysis and keyword analysis. For a business, it is also vitally important that these parameters are dynamically managed and updated on a regular basis. Unless you have a large enough business to dedicate money to fighting spammers, it is more cost efficient to subscribe to a filtration service such as CleanMessage.

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