Spam Filters – What Are They Good For?

I can’t stand spam filters. They seem to make what should be the somewhat simple task of sending and receiving email more like a chore. It would be so much simpler if we just got rid of them!

Well, that’s not necessarily true. Spam filters are far more important than you might think, and you’re probably using one right now, even if you haven’t gone out of your way to make sure there’s one in place.

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Spam filters and email security

Most email services today have a basic level of spam filtering automatically in place which filters out messages that you might not have realised get sent to your email address, such as messages containing viruses, spam/bulk messages, cyber threats, and explicit/adult material.

This level of filtering is considered a standard thing to have in place, and without it our mailboxes would be unusable with the amount of useless, inappropriate, and potentially dangerous content that would clutter them up.

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Filtering - too much vs. not enough

Unfortunately, when we try to implement something that protects us from content like this, there will always be someone who tries to get around those protections, which is why spam filtering is never perfect, and can, a lot of the time, become irritating. These systems do their best job to score the legitimacy of our emails, and these scores determine if those messages are definitely spam, are possibly spam, or are legitimate. We tend to block the definite spam messages, and let the legitimate ones through, but for the possibly dodgy messages, spam filters will put them into quarantine or the junk folder so we can review them for anything which might be legitimate. This is what I would call the lesser of two evils.

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My Spam Filters are driving me crazy!

If you would like to know more about how we can help feel free to contact us and our team of email experts at Cloudwize would love to help you today.