What is the ideal of a spam filter?

Once a person connects to the internet, a whole new world opens, within the boundaries of this world there are good, bad and obnoxious things, and one of such is Spam mail.

Any email service provider will make a strong effort to provide his users with appropriate mail filtering; this means that the mails that are received through the income area of the ESP (email service provider) will be sorted out as known contacts and junk or spam mail. This process can be efficient enough to have a mistake ratio of barely a 5% meaning that from each 100 emails only 5 are mislabelled or selected in the wrong way.

Blocking the access of spam mail to your email is the dream of most users and their service providers alongside with law enforcement officials. Despite their efforts, no spam block tool can function with a 100% efficiency rate.

Yet, even though the ideal world will allow artificial intelligence to sift through all the mails, some human interaction is still required for an adequate success of spam filtering. Still, the most common spam filter software will attempt to sift through each incoming message, letting those emails catalogued as "spam" to sit quietly in the junk inbox, waiting for the user to review them and determine if they are ok senders or should be discarded the next time they arrive.

This is not the only use of a spam filter, such software can also be used to sift through the outgoing email, preventing companies employees to use the corporate email to send spam mails as well as using someone else’s mail for the same purpose.

These types of spam filters, used by the email users or implemented by the email service providers through the customization of the internal filters. These that will react to specific keywords or the general senders’ address, allowing a better performance of the spam filter.

Amongst the customizable filters, a user or email service provider can stop and delete emails containing:

Unwanted propaganda

Phishing requests

Pornographic photographs

Even though the probability of ill filtering of such software is elevated, spammers and phishing scammers strive to be ahead of the law enforcement officials and regulative organisms striving to put a halt to all spam mails, the spam filter software is an adequate tool to assist the human in the selection and discarding of wanted and unwanted emails.

Article source: Spam Filter